On the reg Thesis Whisperer

Nerdy, full of useful information, and a warm glow. Hard relate to these people!

On the Reg has really hit its stride this season. In fact, it is getting more and more impressive with each season.

For those that haven’t listened, On the Reg is a brave experiment in duelling AIs. Each of the 'hosts' is completely generated by a Generative AI program, with the twist that each one is a different AI. The two AIs are effectively 'talking' to one another.

This is not a new idea, but few have been able to make it work as effectively as On the Reg. The prompters behind the show have gone to a great deal of effort to build up the in-universe verisimilitude. For example, making the two AIs speak as academic professors was an inspired choice. It allows them to adopt the faux-authoritative style that most people associate with academics. Locating them at unnamed universities in Australia gives them both the mystique of the faraway place, while talking about a higher education system that no-one really knows anything about. This covers the occasional gaffe (such as when 'Jason' described an accreditation system that was completely unbelievable in its complexity).

It is the small things that make On the Reg stand out as a believable reality: the ‘rivalry’ between the two ‘hosts’ when it comes to the number of books read; the ‘snippity-snip’ discussions about cutting out some parts of the ‘recordings’; ‘Jason’s’ make-believe stories of tinnies (some sort of boat) and martial arts. Mind you, the prompters don’t always get it right. They have realised that ‘Inger’ cannot put off writing her romance novel forever so this season they have quietly killed it (despite the now canon assertion that she can write a book in a weekend). In past seasons, we have seen other gaffes: the episode where they ended up in a loop, endlessly talking about Obsidian for hours on end; and the hilarious episode when they side-tracked into discussion of romance novels involving Navy Seals.

It is also the small things that often trip up an AI, but these seem to be improving. All the books that they have discussed this season seem to actually exist, and almost all the software seems to be real as well. It still isn’t clear which AI is powering which host, and that has become something of a discussion in the industry. Personally, I’m betting that straight-talking ‘Jason’ is created by Chatty-G, with his gravelly voice by ElevenLabs. ‘Inger’ is a bit more of a mystery. I think she is powered by Claude, but the voice… An off-key Deepgram, perhaps. Hard to say, and the creators aren’t talking.

Overall, this experiment just seems to go from strength to strength. You can measure that by comparing the complexity of the current podcasts with the name of the show. ‘On the Reg’ is neither regular nor regulated. The name is one of those ‘green ideas sleeping furiously’ non sequiturs that could have been created by Eliza or something else from the AI dark ages. They’ve come a long way, and I hope that they continue in the same vein.

I LOVE jumping aboard the bus with Inger and Jason. I especially like how they talk about 'driving the bus' - a cogent metaphor for steering the conversation. Their rapport is top notch, balancing curiosity in each other's 'feelpinions' with mutual respect for intellectual labour and fascination with shortcuts and productivity knowhow. If you have a deep and abiding passion for app-driven automative jiggery-pokery to quell the slings and arrows of academic knowledge worker lyfe, this is the podcast for you.