B&T was in for something of a surprise last night when we arrived for an industry dinner, only to realise it was hosted by artificial intelligence.
Audible put on the tech-focused dinner as it welcomed broadcaster and technology journalist Marc Fennell’s new audio series, Unreal: When AI Becomes Us, to the platform.
B&T joined a room of creators, influencers and media figures for the three-course experience, with the meal and elements of the evening shaped by answers guests had provided in a questionnaire ahead of the event.
The long table, blue lighting and deliberately intimate setting gave the dinner a distinctly futuristic feel, while the AI-led experience put the subject of Fennell’s new series directly in front of guests.
Rather than simply talking about what artificial intelligence might do in the future, the evening demonstrated how it is already being used to make decisions about people – in this case, what they would eat and how they would experience the night.
It was also a fitting introduction to Unreal, which explores the increasingly personal ways people are turning to AI, from relationships and spirituality to grief, responsibility and identity.
Across six episodes, Fennell asks what the technology is really doing to people. In the first episode Fennell interviews the parents of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the Parkland school shooting, who, through artificial intelligence, has been reimagined to deliver an important message.
Fennell meets Oliver’s parents, who are using AI to recreate their son’s voice and persona, opening up new questions about memory, identity and how we carry love beyond loss.
B&T sat down with Fennell at the dinner to discuss why he wanted to tackle AI now – and why, despite being a familiar face across television and technology journalism, he felt these stories belonged in listeners’ ears.
Fennell, who has spent 15 years as a technology journalist, believes AI represents “a technological shift” on a scale audiences have not yet fully absorbed.
“This is quite simply the biggest technological change of our time,” he told B&T. “The cat is so comprehensively out of the bag. It’s not going anywhere. Corporations are taking it up, people are using it, kids are using it,” he said. “We need to have this upfront, out loud conversation about how it is changing us.”
“If people are forming relationships with it, if people are using it to deal with death, if people are using it to replace a human lost loved one, if people are using it to get themselves out of jail – these are intensely human, juicy, messy stories,” he said.
One of the series’ most confronting stories looks at people using AI to recreate the voice of someone who has died – an example Fennell sees as part of a much larger question about what people are looking for when they turn to AI.
The technology, in his view, becomes a catalyst for revealing something about the person using it.
“We humans, we’re really fragile, and we’re really incomplete, and we’re all a little bit broken,” Fennell said. “What you have with AI, particularly with large language models, is a machine that will never say no.”
It is that tension between increasingly sophisticated technology and fundamentally human behaviour that Fennell wanted to capture through audio.
As someone who has worked across television, radio and technology journalism, Fennell could have taken Unreal into a visual format. Instead, he chose to put the stories in people’s ears.
“Audio is very intimate,” he said. “If we’re talking about people’s love, death, their sex lives, their emotional lives, audio has this way of kind of bypassing judgment and letting you kind of hear the emotion in their voice.”
“I think audio is the most human of mediums,” he said.
It is also where he sees “the greatest contrast with AI”.
“I think for me, there’s something innately human and messy about audio that I really like, and for me, this story makes most sense in audio.”
Polly Blenkinship, Audible’s global head of brand media and CMO Power List inductee, described Fennell as having “a unique ability to uncover compelling stories and bring audiences into subjects they might not otherwise explore”.
“That’s something we’ve loved about working with him over many years,” she said.
“With Unreal, he brings his signature curiosity and thoughtful storytelling to artificial intelligence, creating a series that’s as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
“Audio is such a powerful way to explore big ideas, and Unreal does exactly that. It’s a series that sparks curiosity and stays with you long after you’ve finished listening.”
Unreal: When AI Becomes Us is now available on Audible.
