This probably isn't really a good analogy. It's just a fact that for most people, a conversation is more engaging than an academic paper. It's easier to pay attention to it, and it's easier to retain the information in it.
This might be healthy food that tastes like a snack.
So let us say you could have effortful (as opposed to buttery-bread "no need to chew"), nutrient, and appetizing: if the snack is effortless (but for the bad spice) but with a hint of possibly no nutrients (when not possibly unhealthy), and tastes the-bad-way weird ("...like, OMG - I hmmmm was, like..."), where is the appetizing part?
If the "conversational form" (very good idea per se) has an implementation which would flow easily if not for the disturbing speech quirks, with doubts about the content quality: where can the interest be?
Conversational audio form is really not an "industrial snack". If I had the chance to listen to podcasts about any topic, I would do so much more often - uploading PDFs of academic papers, manpages, etc.
I personally appreciate the lighter introduction/discussion into a topic. That may be all it's good for, and that's okay. I'm not replacing my reading with this any time soon, precisely because of the problems you mention.
Indeed. But MREs, protein shakes, Huel etc. are also a product of industrialisation.
In this case, I could see potential value for a better iteration of this tech, making it a meal replacement shake rather than a candy bar.
There's too much interesting content for me to read it all, and I have a long commute. Right now I'm using that commute to learn German, and that is a good use of that time, but let's say I didn't need to because I hadn't moved country or I was already fluent: in this hypothetical, I'd gladly have a better AI than this(!) generate podcasts about the articles that I don't have time to read.
But the AI would need to be better than this one for that to be worthwhile — I just popped one of my own blog posts into it, and it was kinda OK-ish, but did make some stuff up. Now sure, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect was written with humans in mind, but that's a shared disappointment and not a reason to let this AI off that particular hook.
This might be healthy food that tastes like a snack.