When Artificial Intelligence Workshops Your Article For You—And It's Really Useful

So this is cool.

Law professor Christian Turner has created an app called EnTalkenator. App users pick an academic paper, and the EnTalkenator app submits the paper to AI services and creates various usable outputs about it.

One option is an AI-generated workshop. If you pick that option, the app creates an audio file purporting to be an AI-generated workshop in which one AI “professor” presents the paper, and then there is a Q&A in which other “professors” critique the paper and ask questions from various perspectives, with the presenting “‘professor” responding. It’s all AI-generated with AI voices, but the AI voices are pretty close to normal human voices.

I learned of this because Christian has created a podcast, The EnTalkenator Podcast, in which he has started posting AI-generated workshops of the papers that Larry Solum picks as “Downloads of the Week.” My most recently-posted article, Data Scanning and the Fourth Amendment, happens to have been selected for that honor. This means that earlier today Christian posted a podcast episode up with an AI-generated workshop of my own new paper.

I gave it a listen. It’s really quite good!

The first twenty minutes provided the oral presentation of the paper. It was a very good summary of the paper and its major claims. The second twenty minutes were the Q&A, featuring four questions about the paper as well as the presenter’s responses.

I was particularly struck by how each question during the Q&A came from a different perspective. The first question was internal to Fourth Amendment law, about how the mosaic theory might alter it. The second question was technological, about the impact of AI and machine learning. (Meta, eh?) The third question was more from a critical theory perspective. And the fourth was about whether there needed to be additional transparency measures for surveillance practices. I could imagine all four of these questions coming up in an actual workshop, which was particularly helpful because I have not workshopped this particular piece. (As it happens, this was one of those papers I wrote and decided to post without getting outside comments.)

Overall, I thought this was super impressive. I should probably create EnTalkenator AI workshops of all of my new papers. It would be especially useful for new papers that have not had the benefit of any outside comments. I always knew that AI could offer this general category of feedback, but the EnTalkenator app did so here in a particularly useful way. And I suspect other scholars might find this application of AI useful, too.