Married to the Machine: Living with AI – Details, episodes & analysis

Intro taster episode for new series answering your questions on Artificial Intelligence

Presented by Stephanie Power and David Reid, Professor, Artificial Intelligence and Spatial Computing

Recorded and edited by Stephanie Power

Sound design by Matt Power

Thanks to BBC Sound Archive and IBM for sound effects. And Gemini 2.5 for our third presenter, the AI

Presenters: Stephanie Power and Professor David Reid

Recording and Mixing: Stephanie Power

Music and sound design: Matt Power

Thanks to the BBC Sound Effects Archive

This podcast is in proof-of-concept stage and is currently non-commercial.

Clip credits: Boys From The Blackstuff, BBC, 1982

BBC News Margaret Thatcher, 'No, No, No' House of Commons 1990

Sinclair ZX80 advert

AI actors, politicians, hallucinations and how schoolkids could work with large language models (without cheating)

Presented by Stephanie Power and Professor David Reid

Concept, recording, and editing: Stephanie Power

Sound design and music composition: Matt Power

Married To The Machine: Living With AI is a news podcast, currently in proof-of-concept stage. It is a non-commercial entity.

Credits:

Particle 6, AI Comedy Sketch, BBC Sound Effects Archive, Mark Sewards MP (AI Assistant) Neural Voice, The AI Guy created by Google Gemini TTS, BBC Newsnight - Michael Howard and Jeremy Paxman (1997), Salman Khan: Brave New Words - How AI Will Revolutionize Education (And Why That's A Good Thing) Allen Lane.

Married To The Machine looks at how AI is impacting you in the real world. Designed for GenX listeners - those who need to know about AI, especially at work, this episode looks at the UK/US tech prosperity deal, the environmental impact of data centres - how much drinking water do you use posting those pics of your dog with human teeth? One listener asks if AI will take all creative jobs, and a mutiny is in the offing, with the AI presenters, even though they only started this week!

Music, sound design and jokes by Matt Power

Presenters: Professor David Reid and Stephanie Power

Thanks to Eddie Mair for the Pepsi question

BBC Sound Archive

This is a non-commercial news podcast.

Professor David Reid, Stephanie Power and the AI Guy discuss scraping authors' creative works to train machines. With a new feature, 'Professor Dave Predicts' we talk about how far we are from AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, which is when AI can do EVERYTHING we can.

Concept, recording and editing: Stephanie Power

Sound design and jokes: Matt Power

Power Productions Ltd

Married To The Machine: Living With AI is a news podcast, currently in proof-of-concept stage. It is a non-commercial entity.

Credits: BBC Sound Effects Archive. AI Guy created by Google Gemini TTS.

AI Workslop is costing businesses thousands, according to a report by Stanford University and Better Up. We explain what workslop is. And Prof Dave gives us an idiot's guide to deepfakes.

Presenters: Professor David Reid and Stephanie Power

recording and editing: Stephanie Power

sound design and jokes: Matt Power

Married To The Machine: Living With AI is a new podcast, in proof-of-concept phase.

Thanks to:

Nationwide Building Society for use of their ad, RTE, Better Up, BBC Sound Archive, Jordan Peele

https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1026/1540488-deep-fake-concerns/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE1KWpoX9Hk

The Department for Education has comissioned a review into the schools curriculum. But have they done enough on AI? The Prof thinks not.

And we try to work out what AI the Ministry of Justice is planning to use to stop prisoners going AWOL.

Presenters: Professor David Reid and Stephanie Power

Recording and Editing: Stephanie Power

Sound Design and Jokes: Matt Power

Married To The Machine: Living With AI is a news podcast, in proof-of-concept phase.

Further reading:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report

https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-new-ml-paradigm-for-continual-learning/

https://moj-analytical-services.github.io/splink/index.html

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/deputy-prime-minister-announces-new-measures-to-bear-down-on-releases-in-error-and-keep-public-safe

Vibe Coding was the Collins Dictionary 2025 'word' of the year. But what is it? Who coined the phrase? And what are the pitfalls of using vibe coding for digital creation?

In this bonus episode, we answer all those questions, and wonder if the former Chief Constable of West Midlands Police understands what AI is.

Further reading:

https://blog.tenzai.com/bad-vibes-comparing-the-secure-coding-capabilities-of-popular-coding-agents/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/beginner-vibe-coding-apps-cursor-replit-hands-on/

https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/01/02/a-new-worst-coder-has-entered-the-chat-vibe-coding-without-code-knowledge/

Academic paper from Massey University, NZ; Wuhan University, China; Polytechnique Montreal, Canada: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05239

The 70 30 problem explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvZGJVAZwr0&t=271s

Andrej Kaparthy Vibe Coding Tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en

The paper that suggests vibe coding slows developers down, METR: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089

An alternative viewpoint:

https://medium.com/write-a-catalyst/i-literally-just-said-vibe-coding-was-gone-then-cursor-2-0-dropped-e3a10695cbf3

Presenters: Professor David Reid and Stephanie Power

Recording, editing and mixing: Stephanie Power

Music and additional material: Matt Power

Married To The Machine: Living With AI, is a news podcast, currently in proof-of-concept stage. It is a non-commercial entity.

Credits: BT advert 'Ology' 1988, The IT Crowd 'The Internet Is Coming' Retort for Channel 4, 2013

Something kicked off in late January. Moltbook - a social space for AI agents. Somewhere humans could, apparently, only observe. Is it really sci-fi adjacent? Prof Dave explains what appears to be going on.

And we talk to the Leader of Barnsley Council, as it is crowned the UK's first Tech Town.

Further reading:

https://hai.stanford.edu/policy/simulating-human-behavior-with-ai-agents

https://theconversation.com/uk

bbc.com/news/articles/c8j3dvjld94o

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/liz-kendalls-speech-at-bloomberg

Credit: Unison Ants and Bear ad: https://www.unison.org.uk/news/article/2004/10/unison-kicks-off-one-in-a-million-recruitment-drive/

Some of our sketch voices and the AI Guy are created using Google AI Studio.

Presenters: Professor David Reid and Stephanie Power

Recording, editing and mixing: Stephanie Power

Music and additional material: Matt Power

Married To The Machine: Living With AI, is a news podcast, currently in proof-of-concept stage. it is a non-commercial entity.

Is it possible to measure how much energy, water and emissions are used to power your AI searches? Can you trust an academic report from Google? And why is the US Department of Defense getting into a row with Dario Amodei's Anthropic

Further reading:

https://arxiv.org/html/2508.15734v1

Some of our sketch voices and the AI Guy are created using Google AI Studio.

Presenters: Professor David Reid and Stephanie Power

Recording, editing and mixing: Stephanie Power

Music and additional material: Matt Power

Married To The Machine: Living With AI is a news podcast, currently in proof-of-concept stage. It is a non-commercial entity.