This is amazing. I uploaded the instruction manual for a Scholander pressure chamber (a piece of equipment for measuring plant moisture stress) and made a podcast from it. The information in the podcast was accurate, it included some light banter and jokes, while still getting across the important topics in the instructions. I don't know what I would use a podcast like this for, but the fact that something like this can be created without human intervention in just a few minutes is jaw dropping, and maybe also just a teeny bit scary.
NotebookLM's is incredibly good at generating the affect and structure of a quality podcast.
This is in-line with all art, music, and video created by LMM at the moment. They are imitating a structure and affect, the quality of the content is largely irrelevant.
I think the interesting thing is that most people don't really care, and AI is not to blame for that.
Most books published today have the affect of a book, but the author doesn't really have anything to say. Publishing a book is not about communicating ideas, but a means to something else. It's not meant to stand on its own.
The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.
> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.
Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs.
I see this sort of convenient resignation all the time in the tech crowd... "creative workers only can blame themselves for tech companies taking their income because their art just isn't any good anymore!"
The poor quality "content" that's been proliferating recently has been created, largely, using the very tools that AI has built, or their immediate precursors. AI, for all its benefits, has only made that worse.
If you're saying, in good faith, that most of the infomercials, televangelist programs, talk radio, celebrity autobiographies, self-help books, scandalous expose books, and health/exercise fad books etc etc etc that came out 50 years ago were made for no reason beyond advancing human knowledge, you're either too young to remember any media from before our current era and haven't looked beyond survivorship bias.
Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off. If their work was that awful, companies wouldn't be clamoring to vacuum it up into their models to make more of it. Nearly all of the salable output from these models exists solely because it took a creative product someone made with the intention of selling it and it's using it to sell a simulacra.
It's using nostalgia to deflect guilt for harpooning the livelihood of many people because it's just more convenient and profitable to empower mediocre "content creators" they use to justify doing it.
I think and hope that you're wrong. There's always been cheese, and there's a lot of it now. But there is still a market for top-notch insight.
For example, Perun. This guy delivers an hourlong presentation on (mostly) the Ukraine-Russia war and its pure quality. Insights, humour, excellent delivery, from what seems to be a military-focused economist/analyst/consultant. We're a while away from some bot taking this kind of thing over.
Think back to the mid-1980s and the first time everyone got their hands on a Casio or Yamaha keyboard with auto-accompaniment.
It was a huge amount of fun to play with, just pressing a few buttons, playing a few notes and feeling like you were producing a "real" pop song. Meanwhile, any actual musicians were to be found crying in the corner of the room, not because a new tool had come along which threatened their position, but because non-musicians apparently didn't understand (at least immediately) the difference between these superficial, low-effort machine-generated sounds and actual music.
It ends up sounding like a smarmy Sunday-morning talk show conversation, with over-exaggerated affect and no content.
So far I've just fed it technical papers, which may be part of the problem, but what I got back was, "Gosh, imagine if a recommender system really understood us? Wow, that would be fantastic, wouldn't it?"
I ran one of my papers into it, mind blown how well they dumbed it down without losing too much details (still quite a lot was ommitted). I wonder if it's domain specific, and I wonder what's the variance by topic.
We’ve become so great at articulation and delivery of empty ideas. To a point, I completely block out people like these in real life. This is an entire career for many.
> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.
I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days.
For example, most furniture pictures from the 60s and 70s are from upper middle class homes. If we listen music, we listen to Queen and not some local band from Alabama (not that I’m against such bands at all; they can make great music too).
I would disagree it's trying to be a "quality" podcast. As usual with AI, it's an average over averages, incredibly mediocre, sometimes borderline satire. For instance, in this example podcast they say "and trust me, guys, you wanna hear all about this", which is where I would usually turn off, because nothing of quality can come after this sentence.
In my company, HR now uses AI to do training videos. It's hilariously funny, because it looks like a satire on training videos (well, granted, it's funny for a minute or two, then it shifts to annoying).
> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.
They're vulnerable because people aren't random. Most of what we do can be modeled statistically and translated into patterns and tendencies. Given a sufficient number of parameters, just about anything we do can be digested by an autocompletion program that can then generate an output similar enough to the real thing to fool us.
Remembering the 90s when I grew up really into alternative music I think what has changed is maybe public perception. AI back then would not have changed much because mainstream pop music was already accepted as generic derivative existing only to make money. Quality was already seen as secondary to be successful. But nowadays maybe due to social networks incentives instead of journalists curation only numbers seem to matter.
it is the perfect milquetoast personality. It's like don lemon but without the interesting bits of don lemon. It has no draw or interest.
Podcasts are only somewhat about things. The most important part is that they're by people, and the people is what draws people in. These ai podcasts are not by people, and when you listen to more than one you start to see the patterns and void where a personality is.
People care about being able to consume information in ways that works for them.
I don't have time to read white papers (nor am I very good at it), but want to know what they consist of. I also want to take my dog for a walk which is hard to do while staring at a screen. This, and other tools like it are useful in achieving that.
I think it is right that people don't care and there is some merit to it.
Reading, or listening to podcast, these days is more akin to a meditation - many people do it to reenforce an identity rather than to expand on themselves.
And I do think that is reasonable as, for many people, there are few other structures that can keep them in check with themselves.
I think the average person is more interested in the output than in the process e.g. more people want to read The Shining than want to read about how The Shining was written
One of my favorite ChatGPT uses is voice chat during long drives as a pseudo, albeit interactive, podcast to learn about various technical topics at the edge of my knowledge base. This podcast generation is pretty amazing, but hopefully they make the "competency level" of the hosts tunable. One thing I love is being able to guide ChatGPT to the technical level I'm looking for. Maybe I'm just bad at finding podcasts, but only Signals and Threads [1] really has that interesting depth.
I've got a product https://reasonote.com which generates podcasts like NotebookLM, and also you interact with the podcast in real-time, so you can regenerate it based on what you're interested in hearing. Working on Whisper input, too!
I uploaded my detailed game design document for a project I've been working on in my free time and it was kind of a weird confidence boost. The two hosts seem to treat ideas like their the most insightful relevatory information they've ever heard. After a few uploads of other documents you start to notice the same overly surprised tone.
The prompt affects that a lot. If I input my writing and ask an LLM to “evaluate,” it will tell me how astute and intriguing my ideas are (often to the point of hyperbole). If I ask instead for it to “critique” me, I’ll get a much less complimentary response about the same content.
This seems to be a common trait of a lot of the more "aligned", "helpful" LLMs out there. You can drop any random excerpt from your diary into ChatGPT and it will tell you about how brilliant, sensitive, and witty you are. It's really quite sickening.
I was suprised at how effective the positivity was on me when I fed it one of my design docs! Color me impressed at the naturalness of the resulting "conversation".
This is impressive from a technical point of view and probably useful from an educational one; I really like the idea that a piece of text can be transformed into any kind of media format easily, depending on your preferences. As recently as a year ago I was using Apple’s text to speech tool to listen to Wikipedia articles while biking, and needless to say, they weren’t very exciting to listen to.
But I don’t think it’s much of a threat to actual podcasts, which tend to be successful because of the personalities of the hosts and guests, and not because of the information they contain.
Which leads me to hope that the next versions of Notebook will allow more customization of the speakers’ voices, tone, education level, etc.
Gave it a bunch of technical papers and standards, and while it's making up stuff that just isn't true, this is to be expected from the underlying system. This can be fixed, e.g., with another internal round of fact-checking or manual annotations.
What really stands out, I think, is how it could allow researchers who have troubles communicating publicly to find new ways to express themselves. I listened to the podcast about a topic I've been researching (and publishing/speaking about) for more than 10 years, and it still gave me some new talking points or illustrative examples that'd be really helpful in conversations with people unfamiliar with the research.
And while that could probably also be done in a purely text-based manner with all of the SOTA LLMs, it's much more engaging to listen to it embedded within a conversation.
I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence.
Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.
I decided to turn my philosophy class's readings into 'podcasts' to introduce and summarize the topics before fully sitting down and skimming for information I missed. It's been hugely helpful - sitting down and reading a 30 page PDF can be daunting/inconvenient, so having a lighter introduction in a more palatable audio format (during workouts, commutes, etc) is amazing. I even uploaded it to Spotify to share with classmates.
I tried it with my resume, and the results surprised me. My observations:
- They do some interesting communication chicanery where one host asks a question to me (the resume owner); I'm not there, so obviously I can't answer. But then immediately the co-host adds some commentary which sort of answers while also appearing to be a natural commentary. The result is that the listener forgets that Michael never answered the question which was directly asked to him. This felt like some voodoo to me.
- Some of the commentary was insightful and provided a pretty nice marketing summary of ideas I tried to convey in my terse (US style) resume.
- Some of the comments were so marketing-ey that I wanted to gag. But at the same time, I recognize that my setpoint on these issues is far toward the less-bs side, and that some-bs actually does appeal to a lot of people and that I could probably play the game a little stronger in that regard.
Overall I was quite impressed.
Then for fun I gave it a Dutch immigration letter, one which said little more than "yeah you can stay, and we'll coordinate the document exchange". They turned that into a 7 minute podcast. I only listened to the first 30 seconds, so I can only imagine how they filled the rest. The opener was funny though: "Have you ever thought of just chucking it all and moving to a distant land?" ... lol. Not so far off the mark, but still quite funny to come up with purely from an administrative document.
I tried it converting bureaucratic documents from Spain, even a paper sheet to just ask for holidays, and it created the funniest podcast I've ever heard. I'm glad I'm not the only one doing this stupid thing.
So basically what you're all saying is how it's technically impressive. Okay.
It is also completely and utterly worthless -- an inefficient and slow method of receiving not-very-many words which were written by nobody at all.
The one and only point listening to a discussion about anything is that at least one of the speakers is someone who has an opinion that you may find interesting or refutable. There are no opinions here for you to engage with. There is no expertise here for you to learn from. There is no writing here. There are no people here.
OK, this is pretty amazing, but is there a "Valley Girl" setting in NotebookLM somewhere? In the sample given in this article, both of the "podcasters" had to add a "like", like every 5 seconds. I couldn't take it:
> this tech is just like leaps and bounds of where it was yesterday like we're watching it go from just spitting out words to like...
I just made a podcast episode about my company where I work by giving it the website. It was surprisingly realistic. It also made me realize how empty many podcasts actually are.
I sent it to my colleagues telling them I "had it produced." I'll reveal the truth tomorrow.
I was surprised that NotebookLM not only allows erotica (for now), the AI hosts approached the topic appropriately and didn't shy away from it, while remaining professional.
Podcasts can be a kind of social experience that's akin to morning talk show hosts, the actual content can be quite low. A real potential of this is the combination of the podcaster's intent and the listener's context. Between the two, podcasts can be generated personalized to each individual listener, while still keeping it a more passive medium and the podcasters can retain their personality in the synthetic form. This has really huge potential for those moments where you want to learn, want some personality and bias, but don't want ¾ of the podcast to be for a general audience. It's an interesting hybrid of broad and narrowcasting. I think by the time it's in the wild, it won't really be a podcast though, because direct q&a will be an option (albeit with the usual drawbacks of LLMs).
AI content emulates the "production values" of high quality content, but it doesn't actually have the quality of the content it's emulating. This is why it seems impressive at first and can even fool people for quite a while. It fools our brains' heuristics for detecting good content. But when you examine it closely, the illusion falls apart. NotebookLM is not different than other generative AI products in this respect.
I do think that this will change in the not too distant future. OpenAI's o1 is a step in the direction we need to go. It will take a lot more test-time compute to produce content that has high quality to match its high production values.
There are already tons of similar AI-generated content on YouTube. It's only a matter of time before stuff like this becomes the equivalent of the omnipresent SEO spam today.
I really enjoy these. I’ve listened to them while driving —- blog posts by Astral Codex Ten or Paul Graham that I had never bothered to read.
There are millions of real podcasts, but now there are an infinite number of AI generated ones. They are definitely not as good as a well-made human one, but they are pretty darn decent, quite listenable and informative.
Time is not fungible. I can listen to podcasts while walking or driving when I couldn’t be reading anything.
I really, really hope they keep investing into NotebookLM and expand its ability to source more types of files, including codebases, complex websites etc. Feels really powerful for anybody studying or consulting many different clusters of learning materials at once.
[+] [-] whyenot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timoth3y|1 year ago|reply
This is in-line with all art, music, and video created by LMM at the moment. They are imitating a structure and affect, the quality of the content is largely irrelevant.
I think the interesting thing is that most people don't really care, and AI is not to blame for that.
Most books published today have the affect of a book, but the author doesn't really have anything to say. Publishing a book is not about communicating ideas, but a means to something else. It's not meant to stand on its own.
The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.
[+] [-] chefandy|1 year ago|reply
Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs.
I see this sort of convenient resignation all the time in the tech crowd... "creative workers only can blame themselves for tech companies taking their income because their art just isn't any good anymore!"
The poor quality "content" that's been proliferating recently has been created, largely, using the very tools that AI has built, or their immediate precursors. AI, for all its benefits, has only made that worse.
If you're saying, in good faith, that most of the infomercials, televangelist programs, talk radio, celebrity autobiographies, self-help books, scandalous expose books, and health/exercise fad books etc etc etc that came out 50 years ago were made for no reason beyond advancing human knowledge, you're either too young to remember any media from before our current era and haven't looked beyond survivorship bias.
Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off. If their work was that awful, companies wouldn't be clamoring to vacuum it up into their models to make more of it. Nearly all of the salable output from these models exists solely because it took a creative product someone made with the intention of selling it and it's using it to sell a simulacra.
It's using nostalgia to deflect guilt for harpooning the livelihood of many people because it's just more convenient and profitable to empower mediocre "content creators" they use to justify doing it.
[+] [-] richardw|1 year ago|reply
For example, Perun. This guy delivers an hourlong presentation on (mostly) the Ukraine-Russia war and its pure quality. Insights, humour, excellent delivery, from what seems to be a military-focused economist/analyst/consultant. We're a while away from some bot taking this kind of thing over.
https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU
Or hardcore history. The robots will get there, but it's going to take a while.
https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
[+] [-] robinsonb5|1 year ago|reply
Think back to the mid-1980s and the first time everyone got their hands on a Casio or Yamaha keyboard with auto-accompaniment.
It was a huge amount of fun to play with, just pressing a few buttons, playing a few notes and feeling like you were producing a "real" pop song. Meanwhile, any actual musicians were to be found crying in the corner of the room, not because a new tool had come along which threatened their position, but because non-musicians apparently didn't understand (at least immediately) the difference between these superficial, low-effort machine-generated sounds and actual music.
[+] [-] oddthink|1 year ago|reply
It ends up sounding like a smarmy Sunday-morning talk show conversation, with over-exaggerated affect and no content.
So far I've just fed it technical papers, which may be part of the problem, but what I got back was, "Gosh, imagine if a recommender system really understood us? Wow, that would be fantastic, wouldn't it?"
[+] [-] 3abiton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lvl155|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] peutetre|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] huijzer|1 year ago|reply
I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days.
For example, most furniture pictures from the 60s and 70s are from upper middle class homes. If we listen music, we listen to Queen and not some local band from Alabama (not that I’m against such bands at all; they can make great music too).
[+] [-] deng|1 year ago|reply
In my company, HR now uses AI to do training videos. It's hilariously funny, because it looks like a satire on training videos (well, granted, it's funny for a minute or two, then it shifts to annoying).
[+] [-] globnomulous|1 year ago|reply
They're vulnerable because people aren't random. Most of what we do can be modeled statistically and translated into patterns and tendencies. Given a sufficient number of parameters, just about anything we do can be digested by an autocompletion program that can then generate an output similar enough to the real thing to fool us.
[+] [-] vishnugupta|1 year ago|reply
This has been the case as far back as I began reading books which is about 30 years.
[+] [-] tarsinge|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LegitShady|1 year ago|reply
Podcasts are only somewhat about things. The most important part is that they're by people, and the people is what draws people in. These ai podcasts are not by people, and when you listen to more than one you start to see the patterns and void where a personality is.
[+] [-] belter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gaieges|1 year ago|reply
I don't have time to read white papers (nor am I very good at it), but want to know what they consist of. I also want to take my dog for a walk which is hard to do while staring at a screen. This, and other tools like it are useful in achieving that.
[+] [-] tossandthrow|1 year ago|reply
Reading, or listening to podcast, these days is more akin to a meditation - many people do it to reenforce an identity rather than to expand on themselves.
And I do think that is reasonable as, for many people, there are few other structures that can keep them in check with themselves.
[+] [-] lordnacho|1 year ago|reply
I was thinking this kind of thing is the perfect way to generate sports commentary.
[+] [-] alickz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vietjtnguyen|1 year ago|reply
[1]: https://signalsandthreads.com/
[+] [-] chatmasta|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] marviel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] famahar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cainxinth|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] corobo|1 year ago|reply
Bring on the one that's all British and snarky!
[+] [-] djur|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] arminiusreturns|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|1 year ago|reply
But I don’t think it’s much of a threat to actual podcasts, which tend to be successful because of the personalities of the hosts and guests, and not because of the information they contain.
Which leads me to hope that the next versions of Notebook will allow more customization of the speakers’ voices, tone, education level, etc.
[+] [-] slhck|1 year ago|reply
What really stands out, I think, is how it could allow researchers who have troubles communicating publicly to find new ways to express themselves. I listened to the podcast about a topic I've been researching (and publishing/speaking about) for more than 10 years, and it still gave me some new talking points or illustrative examples that'd be really helpful in conversations with people unfamiliar with the research.
And while that could probably also be done in a purely text-based manner with all of the SOTA LLMs, it's much more engaging to listen to it embedded within a conversation.
[+] [-] ColinEberhardt|1 year ago|reply
Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.
[+] [-] sodality2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelteter|1 year ago|reply
- They do some interesting communication chicanery where one host asks a question to me (the resume owner); I'm not there, so obviously I can't answer. But then immediately the co-host adds some commentary which sort of answers while also appearing to be a natural commentary. The result is that the listener forgets that Michael never answered the question which was directly asked to him. This felt like some voodoo to me.
- Some of the commentary was insightful and provided a pretty nice marketing summary of ideas I tried to convey in my terse (US style) resume.
- Some of the comments were so marketing-ey that I wanted to gag. But at the same time, I recognize that my setpoint on these issues is far toward the less-bs side, and that some-bs actually does appeal to a lot of people and that I could probably play the game a little stronger in that regard.
Overall I was quite impressed.
Then for fun I gave it a Dutch immigration letter, one which said little more than "yeah you can stay, and we'll coordinate the document exchange". They turned that into a 7 minute podcast. I only listened to the first 30 seconds, so I can only imagine how they filled the rest. The opener was funny though: "Have you ever thought of just chucking it all and moving to a distant land?" ... lol. Not so far off the mark, but still quite funny to come up with purely from an administrative document.
[+] [-] amunozo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] handelaar|1 year ago|reply
It is also completely and utterly worthless -- an inefficient and slow method of receiving not-very-many words which were written by nobody at all.
The one and only point listening to a discussion about anything is that at least one of the speakers is someone who has an opinion that you may find interesting or refutable. There are no opinions here for you to engage with. There is no expertise here for you to learn from. There is no writing here. There are no people here.
There is nothing of any value here.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago|reply
> this tech is just like leaps and bounds of where it was yesterday like we're watching it go from just spitting out words to like...
[+] [-] jmugan|1 year ago|reply
I sent it to my colleagues telling them I "had it produced." I'll reveal the truth tomorrow.
[+] [-] kolinko|1 year ago|reply
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7973d9a3-87a1-4d88-98...
[+] [-] kristopolous|1 year ago|reply
I also tried the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy. It was actually well done. https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/1d13e76e-eb4b-48ef-89...
Also just uploading msdos 1.25 asm https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v1.25/source
It was way better than I though
I think the best is the self referential. This actual comment thread: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/4a67cf10-dd3b-42b3-b5...
[+] [-] valleyer|1 year ago|reply
But when it makes references to such-and-such happening on line number X, and I go check line X, it turns out to be totally mistaken.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CaptainFever|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vid|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|1 year ago|reply
I do think that this will change in the not too distant future. OpenAI's o1 is a step in the direction we need to go. It will take a lot more test-time compute to produce content that has high quality to match its high production values.
[+] [-] userbinator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pbw|1 year ago|reply
There are millions of real podcasts, but now there are an infinite number of AI generated ones. They are definitely not as good as a well-made human one, but they are pretty darn decent, quite listenable and informative.
Time is not fungible. I can listen to podcasts while walking or driving when I couldn’t be reading anything.
Here’s one I made about the Aschenbrenner 165-page PDF about AGI: https://youtu.be/6UmPoMBEDpA
[+] [-] d4rkp4ttern|1 year ago|reply
https://illuminate.google.com/home?pli=1
Currently only handles arxiv PDFs.
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zerop|1 year ago|reply