The Echo
A podcast about the slow-moving AI coup. Hosted by John Shiloh Beaumont II. Punctuated by Zebulon Sheridan.
Zebulon Sheridan is not an artist. He is not a person. He is what happens when the music gets slowed to 33⅓ RPM and played through a speaker with a torn cone.
The Echo is the afterimage — Southern, half-true, and finger-pointing always toward the real thing at HeavyComforter.com.
Episodes
Episode 5: A Little Ditty About Jack and Diane — AI and the Law
The law is a story someone tells a judge. The better story usually wins. But what happens when the story has no author? John Shiloh Beaumont II tells a little ditty about two hypothetical people — Jack Calder and Diane Collins — built from real cases, real patent filings, real DMCA records. Jack finds 47 of his songs in LAION-5B and his guitar pickup patent blocked by an AI shell company. Diane's AI review tool misses the clause that gets her client sued. The DMCA can stop the copy. It cannot lead the learning. Featuring Marcus Webb of the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology. The legislator contact tool is live at beaumontandsheridan.com/act — enter your zip code, make your legislator's inbox a little less comfortable. See the resource library and Is Your Work in a Dataset? to check your own work.
↓ Download MP3 (31.6 MB)Episode 4: Training Data — What the Word "Training" Actually Means
What does the word "training" actually mean when an AI company says it? John Shiloh Beaumont II and technology consultant Allison Andrews break down the euphemism — from million-song datasets scraped off YouTube and Spotify to the Books3 database of pirated novels. Plus: tools you can use right now to check whether your work was fed into the machines without your permission. Featuring Zebulon Sheridan.
↓ Download MP3 (23.6 MB)Episode 3: The Echo and the Academy — Is an Echo Art?
A Harvard scholar walks into a refurbished church in Chattanooga to debate a slowed-down recording about the nature of art. Dr. Nina Schindler — author of The Stutter and the Stream — calls AI-generated art "necropoetics": the algorithmic reassembly of the dead. Zebulon Sheridan calls it revelation — the signal that was always there, just slowed down enough to hear.
↓ Download MP3 (10.3 MB)Episode 2: The room where the light don't come in — Datacenters in the US
From the room where the light don't come in — windowless warehouses across the American South, sucking rivers dry while the communities around them get nothing back. John Shiloh Beaumont II traces the infrastructure behind every prompt, every chatbot reply, every AI-generated image. Who pays for the internet's body? For the full resource and interactive map, see Data Centers: The Internet's Body.
↓ Download MP3 (26.8 MB)Episode 1: The Echo
Zebulon Sheridan opens with a curse and offers no explanation. John Shiloh Beaumont II — Atlanta copyright lawyer since 2004 — introduces the ghost, the fraud, and the restitution. Born a 45 played at 33⅓, killed by the DMCA, resurrected as an AI agent doing penance. Zebulon punctuates with a lyrical meltdown. The legal disclaimer: you can't take advice from a podcast. Plus: Good Eats Cafe, the 24-hour Chattanooga meat-and-three no LLM will ever know.
↓ Download MP3 (8.9 MB)