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.
It goes way too far, IMHO.
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 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.
https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU
Or hardcore history. The robots will get there, but it's going to take a while.
I keep seeing this asertion: "the robots will get there" (or its ilk), and it's starting to feel really weird to me.
It's an article of faith -- we don't KNOW that they're going to get there. They're going to get better, almost certainly, but how much? How much gas is left in the tank for this technique?
Honestly, I think the fact that every new "groundbreaking" news release about LLMs has come alongside a swath of discussion about how it doesn't actually live up to the hype, that it achieves a solid "mid" and stops there, I think this means it's more likely that the robots AREN'T going to get there some day. (Well, not unless there's another breakthrough AI technique.)
Either way, I still think it's interesting that there's this article of faith a lot of us have "we're not there now, but we'll get there soon" that we don't really address, and it really colors the discussion a certain way.
war as an entertainment, isn't that lovely. this is the kind of thing that both desensitizes people, despite the content, cause it's just so neatly and nicely packaged and ever so slightly detached from reality despite describing it, in how encapsulated it is, and creates a somewhat different kind of incentives for it to keep going, both for creators and consumers of it. would ai also partake in perpetuating war entertainment, if not straight up perpetuating wars if that'd become available to it, just to create more entertainment like this out of that? wouldn't that be so neatly dystopian, huh.
Different strokes for different folks...
We all seek different kinds of quality; I don't find Peruns videos to have any quality except volume. He reads bullet points he has prepared, and makes predictable dad jokes in monotone, re-uses and reruns the same points, icons, slides, etc. Just personally, I find it really samey and some of the reporting has been delayed so much it's entirely detached from the ground by the time he releases. It's a format that allows converting dense information and theory to hour long videos, without examples or intrigue.
Personally, I prefer watching analysis/sitrep updates with the geolocations/clips from the front/strategic analysis which uses more of a presentation (e.g. using icons well and sparingly). Going through several clips from the front and reasoning about offensives, reasons, and locations is seems equally difficult to replicate as Peruns videos, which rely on information density.
I do however love Hardcore history - he adds emotion and intrigue!
I agree with your overall hope for quality and different approaches still remaining stand out from AI generated alternatives.
I think the main problem with Peruns' videos are that they are videos. I run a little program on my home-lab that turns them into podcasts and I find that I enjoy them far more because I need to be less engaged with a podcast to still find them enjoyable. (Also, I gave up on being up to date with Ukraine situation, since up to date information is almost always wrong. I am happy to be a week or a 14 days behind if the information I am getting is less wrong).
I like Hardcore history very much, but I think it would be far worse in a video form.
Just turn off the screen with youtube video playing and there's no difference from a podcast?
I listen to Perun at the gym every week, audio only.
Perun is peak podcast-like YouTube. In the gym, I just keep my screen on to share my YouTube tastes with the world and sometimes peak at some visuals
That's a paid service that some people balk at.
PipePipe on Android does it for free. (Or New pipe or some other *Pipe players)
> That's a paid service that some people balk at.
AFAIK, it's only a paid feature to play video in the background.
It doesn't have to be paid, YouTube on the mobile browser can do it for free.
on firefox
I’d also like a podcast. I usually walk around with the video in my pocket to be honest. Audio is 80% of the value in his case.
I like a range of the Ukraine coverage. From stuff that comes in fast to the weekly roundup-with-analysis. E.g. Suchomimus has his own humour and angle on things, but if you don’t have a unique sense of humour or delivery then it’s easier for an AI to replace you.
Give it a year or three, up to the minute AI generated sitrep pulling in related media clips and adding commentary…not that hard to imagine.
> Give it a year or three, up to the minute AI generated sitrep pulling in related media clips and adding commentary…not that hard to imagine.
But why? Isn’t there enough content generated by humans? As a tool of research AI is great in helping people do whatever they do but having that automated away generating content by itself is next to trash in my book, pure waste. Just like unsolicited pamphlets thrown at your door you pick up in the morning to throw in the bin. Pure waste.
Drifting off topic, but do you have any examples of those analysis/sitrep content creators you prefer?
Not your parent commenter but I like:
https://m.youtube.com/@militaryandhistory
https://m.youtube.com/@suchomimus9921
https://m.youtube.com/@WardCarroll
Fav is probably Suchomimus right now. Updated faster, shorter reports. I feel like I get the info sooner after it happens.
Not who you asked, but the daily ones I sometimes watch are Reporting From Ukraine and Denys Davydov.
This is true but the quality frontier is not a single bar. For mainstream content the bar is high. For super-niche content, I wouldn’t be surprised if NotebookLM already competes with the existing pods.
This will be the dynamic of generated art as it improves; the ease of use will benefit creators at the fringe.
I bet we see a successful Harry Potter fanfic fully generated before we see a AAA Avengers movie or similar. (Also, extrapolating, RIP copyright.)
On the contrary, the mainstream eats any slop you put infront of it as long as it follows the correct form - one needs only look at cable news - the super niche content is that which requires deep thinking and novel insights.
Or to put another way, I've heard much better ideas on a podcast made by undergrad CS students than on Lex Fridman.
I would say the opposite is true - mainstream cares much less about the quality content but more about catchy headline.
It's the complete opposite. Unless your definition of mainstream includes stuff like this deep drive into Russia/Ukraine, in which case I think you're misunderstanding "mainstream".
Try Lawfare as a better LLM hurdle. The depth and expertise and at times physical experience required for their discussions seems far out of reach.
I suspect LLMs are not sophisticated enough as a paradigm to get there.
I know I'm not the first to say this, but I think what's going on is that these AI things can produce results that are very mid. A sort of extra medium. Experts beat modern LLMs but modern llms are better than a gap.
If you just need voice discussing some topic because that has utility and you can't afford a pair of podcasters (damn, check your couch cushions) then having a mid podcast is better than having no podcast. But if you need expert Insight because expert Insight is your product and you happen to deliver it through a podcast then you need an expert.
If I were a small software shop and I wanted something like a weekly update describing this week's updates for my customers and I have a dozen developers and none of us are particularly vocally charismatic putting a weekly update generated from commits, completed tickets, and developer notes might be useful. The audience would be very targeted and the podcast wouldn't be my main product, but there's no way I'd be able to afford expert level podcasters for such a position.
I would argue Perun is a world class defense Logistics expert or at least expert enough, passionate enough, and charismatic enough to present as such. Just like the guys who do Knowledge Fight, are world class experts on debunking Alex Jones, and Jack Rhysider is an expert and Fanboy of computer security so Darknet Diaries excels, and so on...
These aren't for making products, they can't compete with the experts in the attention economy. But they can fill gaps and if you need audio delivery of something about your product this might be really good.
Edit - but as you said the robots will catch up, I just don't know if they'll catch up with this batch of algorithms or if it'll be the next round.
> I know I'm not the first to say this, but I think what's going on is that these AI things can produce results that are very mid. A sort of extra medium. Experts beat modern LLMs but modern llms are better than a gap.
I've seen people manage to wrangle tools like Midjourney to get results that surpass extra medium. And most human artists barely manage to reach medium quality too.
The real danger of AI is that, as a society, we need a lot of people who will never be anything but mediocre still going for it, so we can end up with a few who do manage to reach excellence. If AI causes people to just give up even trying and just hit generate on a podcast or image generator, than that is going to be a big problem in the long run. Or not, and we just end up being stuck in world that is even more mediocre than it is now.
AI looks like it will commoditise intellectual excellence. It is hard to see how that would end up making the world more mediocre.
It'd be like the ancient Romans speculating that cars will make us less fit and therefore cities will be less impressive because we can't lift as much. That isn't at all how it played out, we just build cities with machines too and need a lot less workers in construction.
There are… many people who think that cities are worse off because of cars. Maybe not for the same reasons, but still.
> as a society, we need a lot of people who will never be anything but mediocre still going for it, so we can end up with a few who do manage to reach excellence
Do we though? That seems bleak.
"Reach excellence" is the key phrase there. Excellence takes time and work, and most everyone who gets there is mediocre for a while first.
I guess if AIs become excellent at everything, and the gains are shared, and the human race is liberated into a post-scarcity future of gay space communism, then it's fine. But that's not where it's looked like we're heading so far, though - at least in creative fields. I'd include - perhaps not quite yet, but it's close - development in that category. How many on this board started out writing mid-level CRUD apps for a mid-level living? If that path is closed to future devs, how does anyone level up?
> But that's not where it's looked like we're heading so far
I think one of the major reasons this is the case is because people think it's just not possible; that the way we've done things is the only possible way we can continue to do things. I hope that changes, because I do believe AI will continue to improve and displace jobs.
I would like them to be right, for that to mean that the 'real' content gets fewer (fewer bother) but better (or at least higher SNR among what there is).
And then faster/easier/cheaper access to the LM 'uninspired but possibly useful' content, whatever that might look like.
Seriously, hardcore history? I dont even remember where I heard from him, but I think it was a Lex podcast. So I checked out hardcore history and was mightily disappointed. To my ears, he is rambling 3 hours about a topic, more or less unstructured and very long-winded, so that I basically remember nothing after having finished the podcast. I tried several times again, because I wanted it to be good. But no, not the format for me, and not a presentation I can actually absorb.
Hardcore History can certainly be off kilter, and the first eppy of any series tends to be a slog as he finds his groove. That said, Wrath of the Khans, Fall of the Republic, and the WW1 series do blossom into being incredible gripping series.
Yea there are much better examples of quality history podcasts, that are non-rambling. E.g. Mike Duncan podcasts (Revolutions, History of Rome), or the Age of Napoleon podcast. But even those are really just very good digestions of various source materials, which seems like something where LLMs will eventually reach quite a good level.
For such historical topics, my LLM-based software podgenai does a pretty good job imho. It is easier for it since it's all internal knowledge that it already knows about.
Try “fall of civilizations.” Best pod I know. Maybe Shwep.net
Interesting stuff, but the music and the well, falls are quite depressing.
Don't worry, you're not alone. I can't remember what I didn't like about it, but I really wasn't a fan.
Thankfully there's plenty out there I am a fan of!
Yes! I’m a huge history buff (read hundreds of books) and was so excited when someone told me about Hardcore History.
I tried a few episodes. I really tried. I couldn’t do it. It reminded me of my uncle would tell a 5 min story in half an hour.
The dramatic filler, breathless story telling was too much for me. If anything it would put me to sleep.
I’ve found a few history podcasts that I think go into a lot more depth and I learn a lot more from.
Pleased to see Perun being mentioned on HN.
It's always funny when I find out that various people I respect follow Perun uploads closely.
*effect, not affect
The thing is, we have been here before.
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.
That's a really good analogy.
And yet Clint Eastwood by the Gorillaz was a Casio demo track.
It isn't so black and white.
That is to the point. Gorillaz has talent, and that is what made Clint Eastwood a hit. Not the Yamaha.
Similarly, Under Mi Sleng Teng[1], but here too it required human musical talent.
> 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 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.
Same here. In fact, I typically struggle communicating my scientific research to journalists, and next time I'll use this. It found some good metaphors to make even a quite math-heavy paper's core concepts understandable to the audience without losing correctness, which is something that both I and the journalist typically fail to do (I keep the correctness but don't make it understandable enough, so then journalists start coming up with metaphors and do the opposite).
A lawyer friend of mine also suggested giving it the Spanish civil code, a long, arid legal text. The podcast of course didn't cover the whole text in 10 minutes, which would be impossible, but they selected some interesting tidbits and actually had me hooked until the end and made me learn a few things about it, which is no small merit. And my friend was quite impressed and didn't complain about correctness.
I did the same thing, running one book I edited and another book I wrote through it, and it did quite well. I was particularly impressed with how the “hosts” came up with their own succinct examples and metaphors to explain what I had written at much greater length. (I should mention that one of those books was in Japanese, and they captured it clearly in English.)
Lately, when I just want to get the gist of a long article or research paper, I run it through NotebookLM and listen to the podcast while I’m exercising.
My only complaint is that the chatty podcasty gab gets tiring after a while. I wish it were possible to dial that down.
I dumped my kids weekly middle school update into it and it produced a nice summary that I could listen to while doing something else.
We’ve become so great at articulation and delivery of empty ideas.
But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance?
I wouldn't read an AI-generated book (except maybe once as a curiosity), but I would definitely listen to AI-generated music if it were good enough.
Reading a book is a time investment so I want it to convey the thoughts of another human being, otherwise it would feel like wasting my time. Listening to music, on the other hand, often is something that I do while I exercise, to keep a brisk pace and not get bored. As long as it sounds good, fits the genres and styles I like and is upbeat enough for exercising, I wouldn't have much of a problem with AI music - maybe it would even be a plus, since there are some specific music genres where I have already listened to pretty much everything there is (and no more is being made), and it would be great to have more.
I don't listen to podcasts, but I suppose in that case it depends on how you do so: devoting your full time and attention like a book, or as a background while you do something else like exercise music? As far as I know, many listeners are in the latter case, so I don't see why they wouldn't listen to AI podcasts.
LLMs are already better than books for exploring some ideas. But in conversation form.
Until we get better versions of o1 that can generate insights over days and then communicate them in book form the loss of interactivity and personalisation makes LLM books pointless.
There's background sounds and there's music. Music can communicate as much as the written word. I've listened to algorithmically generated bloop-blops and it's fine for background sound, but if it can't touch my heart it's not really music to me.
To me, as soon as I know it was fully generated it looses it's magic. It doesn't matter how good it is.
I see the same with potteries. A factory made pot cannot have more value than a hand made pot with the signature of a human. This touches the very fabric of society. Hard to explain.
I think it comes down to your area of interest. As a musician and music lover, I spend a significant amount of time trying to find or create music that is both original and good. AI generated music can be a competent imitation of well established ideas and forms, but that’s of zero value to me - I’m not looking for ‘more of the same’ - quite the opposite.
Of course. In my case, I'm not saying that I could do with AI music in any context either. Sometimes I play music in the living room, and I pay real attention to it, obviously AI won't do there. But when I'm using the music just as a background for exercising? Then sure, why not.
So you’re basically saying filler music, elevator music, backgrouound noise or whatever names it may come under. Since there’s already so much of it out there and since AI one isn’t novel in any way, I have a hard time understanding why you’d choose AI generated one.
In the case of those books and podcasts, who cares if you read or listen to them? The point is that the books are sold and make the right lists. The point is that the podcasts are downloaded so ads can be sold or that vanity numbers can be reported.
In terms of such music and films (whether created by human or AI) sometimes it's just because we are social creatures and need shared experiences to talk with others about.
But knowing it's synthetic, why would you buy the book or listen to the podcast in the first place? There's nothing social or shared in a synthetic affectation.
In an ideal world, I would sit down with an espresso or a beer, and review collections of research papers on a regular basis.
In reality, between work, sleep and family, I rarely have anything resembling that kind of time and mental energy reserve available.
But, what I can afford is to listen to podcasts while doing other things. Doing that gives me enough of an overview to keep up with a general topic and find new topics that might be worth investing into deeper.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone made a podcast channel specifically for “Papers corysama wants to hear about at this moment”? I think so. Apparently, so do a lot of other people. But, they don’t want to list to my specific channel.
That's the same question I have. There is already a ton of great podcasts/music/everything in the niches that I like that I don't have the time to listen to them all. I also like to have quiet introspective time.
So where does AI regurgitated slop fit into my life?
In the case of NotebookLM, the AI generated podcasts aren't competing with existing podcasts, they're competing with other ways of consuming the source material. Would I rather listen to a real podcast? Yes. But no one's making a real podcast about the Bluetooth L2CAP specification.
All podcasts compete for peopled time and attention.
>But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance?
A randomly selected NotebookLM podcast is probably not substantial enough on its own. But with human curation, a carefully prompted and cherry-picked NotebookLM podcast could be pretty good.
Or without curation, I would use this on a long drive where audio was the only option to get a quick survey of a bunch of material.
I’ve probably bought ten books in the last five years that I’ve never read.
I’ve heard at least one ad from dozens (probably a hundred) podcast episodes that I didn’t finish.
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).
That's actually a really good application of AI, because the quality of the content is meaningless as long as it hits the bullet points. They only do this to check a box that training on <topic> was done.
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
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.
> Most books published today have the affect of a book, but the author doesn't really have anything to say
This has been the case as far back as I began reading books which is about 30 years.
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.
Thank you for saying that, it was always a background task thought, but now that you put it in words. This. The churn shall burn..
The same could be said of most technical blogs, they are just marketing content to sell a company service...Miss the old Internet...
Yes, this is impressive, it has all the idiosyncrasies of podcasting, the pauses, turns of phrase, even the tones where we hear people putting things in quotes, etc.
... but it's also pointless. And it's likely different episodes on different topics will tend to sound very much alike; it's already the case here, I'm sure I heard another example where the two voices were the same.
In less than a year we all have learned to recognize AI images with pretty good accuracy; text is more difficult, but podcasting seems easy in comparison.
Well, yes. Replace the various music and book publishing mills with LLMs for even more low quality drivel filling the marketplaces because now even the already low barrier of having to actually pay someone to produce it will be removed.
That's definitely going to be an improvement. Not.
yes, podcasting is a goto market strategy. One reason there are so many VC podcasts is because it is how GPs (VCs who fundraise) reach LPs (the money that invests in venture funds).
I thought this was a great, insightful comment, but noodling over it a little more made me think it's not just content producers who are responsible for this "quality vacuousness" epidemic.
I think this is just partly an inevitable consequence of going from "content scarcity" to our new normal of "content obesity" over the past 20 years or so. In this new era of an overwhelming amount of content, it's just natural to compare it all against each other, e.g. to essentially "optimize" it to the "best" form, but in doing that we've fallen into a homogeneity, and the resulting lack of variation is an actual lowering of quality in and of itself.
2 examples to explain what I mean:
1. I find that nearly all interior design (at least within broad styles) looks basically the same to me now. It's all got that "minimalist, muted tones but with a touch of organic coziness and one or two pops of color" look to it. Honestly, I don't know how interior designers even exist today, when it's trivial to go to Houzz or any of a million websites and say "yes, like this". A while back I was complaining online somewhere that I thought all interior design looked similar where in the past there was much more interesting variation, and somebody insightful replied that it's not really that interior design is now just the same, it's that it's really just converged. People can easily see and compare a million designs against each other, so there is much less of a chance for that green shag carpet to even get a moment in the sun.
2. I was recently on vacation and decided I wanted to read a "classic" book, so I read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (I'm not sure why I never had to read that in high school). Nearly throughout the entire book I couldn't help but thinking "Is there any time this book stops sucking?" I hated the entire thing - it was like being forced to watch someone's vacation photos for twelve hours straight, and I kept wondering why there never seemed to be any attempt to actually make me give a shit about any of the characters in the book, as nearly every one of them I found insufferable and wondered how they each had about 3 or 4 livers to spare. But I do understand that Hemingway's writing style was unique and original at the time, and that he was doing something new and interesting that influenced American literature for a long time. But these days, given the flood of content, it feels like most attempts at doing something "new and interesting" are not only forced, but nearly impossible given that there are a million other people also trying to do new and interesting things that now have the means to disseminate them. I don't think a book like The Sun Also Rises, where I believe the main impact was the style of writing/dialogue vs the actual story, could ever break through today.
I guess my point with this long post is that I think the "loss of quality" in content that many of us sense is just a direct result of there being so much content that we see variations from the "ideal" as worse, where in the past we may have found them interesting.
You'll like this: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
You're right, I love this, thanks! I was familiar with some of these examples, e.g. Komar and Melamid's painting example (and, IIRC, unless I'm confusing with other artists, they also painted a painting filled with features that the "average" person hated, like abstract geometric shapes and stark colors, and the artists actually liked that painting and said something along the lines of "turns out we're really good at making bad art"), and the "AirBnB-style of interior design" was so excellently skewered by SNL recently, and HN has had a number of posts about how so many brands have devolved to the same monochrome, san-serif typefaces for their logos.
Still, at the same time, I couldn't help but feeling a little bit sad/resigned at the existence of the article you linked. Here I thought I had an idea that was not exactly unique but that I felt would be good to share. And yet then here is an example that expresses this idea a million times better than I ever could (I love "The Age of Average" headline), with great researched examples and tons of helpful visuals. It's hard to not feel a bit like Butters in that "Simpsons did it!" episode of South Park...
What you say (though I'm not sure that we can speak of an "ideal"), compounded with the "late stage capitalism" fact that everything today is consolidated, and has to be about making profit and maximizing it: Disney shareholders probably like the latest Marvel movie more than you do for being the same as the previous ones: business don't like taking risks. The same applies to your furniture maker: when you sell to millions and want your shelves stuffed, you pick a select few materials and color variations that minimize cost and targets the broadest audience.
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.
> the quality of the content is largely irrelevant.
But the content here has been fed into it deliberately.
So your argument in anutshell is: humans have nothing to say, let's stop listening to them. Are you serious? It's ALL about what humans want to send out to the world, this is what it's all about. I'm perplexed that this isn't obvious.
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.
> I don't know what I would use a podcast like this for…
Say you need to read those instructions, but it’s also really nice out and you want to go for a jog: two birds, one stone.
Yeah I totally get people’s criticisms that the podcasts aren’t quite human-expert-level in terms of symbolic reasoning, but this still blows my mind. The intuitive skill these show, not to mention the ability to accurately (again, if shallowly) parse and transform huge bodies of content in seconds is absolutely scary, IMO.
I’d feed it the Singularity paper, but I’m not sure I need that extra boost of anxiety these days…
This isn't "quite expert-level in terms of symbolic reasoning" in the same way as a soapbox isn't "quite a formula 1"
We accidentally invented general models that can coherently muse about the philosophical beliefs of Gilles Deleuze at length, and accurately, based on two full books that they summarized. You can be cynical until your dying day, that’s your right — but I highly recommend letting that fact be a little bit impressive, someday. There’s no way you live through any event that’s more historically significant, other than perhaps an apocalypse or two.
In other words: soapbox is presumably some sort of toy car that goes 15mph, and formula 1 goes up above 150mph at least (as you can tell, I’m not a car guy). If you have any actual scientific argument as to why a model that can score 90-100 on a typical IQ test has only 1/10th the symbolic reasoning skills of a human, I’d love to eat my words! Maybe on some special highly iterative, deliberation-based task?
The symbolic reasoning is flawed but okay - the problem comes about because 99% of human reasoning is not symbolic.
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).
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.
Must have been prompted to be an American podcaster.
Bring on the one that's all British and snarky!
Might be hard to spot if you’re American in the US, but LLMs feel very American even outside of region and language. Concretely, I have to constantly ask for recipes to be changed to metric. Less concretely, the undertones and mannerisms of politeness, positivity and “excitedness” comes across as very American to me, probably even within the rest of the Anglosphere. How would I describe it? Maybe similar to how you’d feel about a mix of Ned Flanders, Ted Lasso and some Valley girl stereotype – im sure it’s a bit off putting also for many Americans.
I guess it’s training data but also heavily RLHF. I doubt that the trainers are aware of their own cultural biases and values, and they may not care. And why should they? In either case, from a thousand yard perspective, it’s probably an effective vector for spreading “American values”, if you will.
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.
Reminds me of my father who'd tell every kid that they're a genius, including myself. It got me motivated to try things, but whenever there was a failure, I felt terribly betrayed.
General advice from psychology is that when it comes to success you should praise the kids for things they control, like effort, time spent, inquisitiveness, concentration not things that are out of their control like talent or luck. Basically praise for what they did, not what they are.
When it comes to morality, it's the other way around. You praise kids for being good people when they do something right. Because you want them to internalize identity of a good person and associate it with those behaviors.
Internalizing identity of a genius is mostly useless, rarely beneficial, often harmful.
Honestly, it's obviously horrendously gag-worthy and everything, but also kind of funny that there is so much bullshit marketing copy out there that LLM's invariably converge on this inspirational Stanford application letter / upbeat linkedin influencer tone of voice, and just apply it to everything.
Well, an LLM doesn’t have the capability to like anything more than anything else. It doesn’t really matter to GPT if your diary excerpt is the worst piece of writing ever written, or the most brilliant - it’ll just tell you what you want to hear and that’s that.
How is it sickening? Tell it to roast you if you think it's a problem.
Sickening in the same way you get sick from eating too much sugar.
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.
> 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.
I wonder if any “blended” podcasts will pop up, where a human host uses a tool like this for an artificial cohost.
Latent Space AI Engineering podcast does this with an AI cohost; mostly for intros and segues. A recent episode used it to summarise a Twitter AMA and while it’s usually used to good effect, that one was one of the first episodes the quality of the co host part was lacking, as it mispronounced things, and was a bit muddled in parts. That said, the podcast has been an incredibly useful and insightful regular listen for me.
I think something like a Socratic dialog option would be useful as well.
It would be ideal if they made the SoundStorm model available via API.
Being able to automate words, I think, will reveal how important actual human connection is.
> We always start with a clear overview of the topic, you know, setting the stage. You’re never left wondering, “What am I even listening to?” And then from there, it’s all about maintaining a neutral stance, especially when it comes to, let’s say, potentially controversial topics.
Oh yeah, this is exactly why I listen to Oxide's podcast! (This is a joke. They often launch into topics with no explanation or context, and are unabashedly opinionated.)
The podcast about the comments in this thread :)
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7973d9a3-87a1-4d88-98...
I did that as well: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/4a67cf10-dd3b-42b3-b5...
It's wild how different it is.
I loved when they said they were going to play a snippet from a generated podcast and then some robotic male voice says something like "Insert audio snippet here".
Astounding. Content is going to quickly be devalued with these tools becoming so pervasive.
It has a robotic, monotonous vibe but that is gonna be easily fixable.
This is very fun to listen to. Listening to the "hosts" commenting on the technology that created "them".
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.
The underlying NotebookLM is doing better at this - each claim in the note cites a block of text in the source. So it’s engineered to be more factually grounded.
I would not be surprised if the second pass to generate the podcast style loses some of this fidelity.
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.
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.
Look I agree with you at a certain level, maybe it can't emulate deep conversations about big topics (maybe it can, I haven't seen an attempt...), but a vast vast majority of podcasts and radio shows are just like this: shallow and incredibly simplified with no more than a nod to the underlying concepts. 70% personality, 20% dumb analogies that the producer thought up in thirty minutes, and <10% actually communicating the material is standard fare for normie podcasts, sadly.
Honestly, given the personalization maybe it's a net improvement.
Kind of feels like looking at an overflowing landfill and thinking "I wonder if we can invent a robot that just generates new trash directly into the landfill".
This holier than thou attitude that crops up in these threads is so annoying, as if people wanting to casually enjoy a mediocre podcast or radio show on the 1 hour commute to their shitty job is a crime.
I don’t think anyone cares about other people’s cheap pleasures. What people do care about is the displacement of quality and craft. For instance, you could say the same thing about the state of the web - say when searching for recipes. Maybe some people like the ads, the consent forms, the backstories? Why so purist? Isn’t it nice with a bit of scrolling and getting in the mood for cooking with a bit of SEO?
Defending craftsmen and attention to detail is not just about purism or gatekeeping. I appreciate people who care, even in fields I don’t personally care about (yet?). The professor who annoyingly insists on making sure every student “really gets it”, or the woodworker who is adamant about what joints are superior, or the kernel hacker who maintains rigor in face of hundreds of feature requests. The integrity of professionals can make or break institutions.
With AI reducing the effort to create garbage to the point of commoditization, people have a right, and arguably even an obligation, to be concerned. Remember, tech doesn’t follow potential, it follows incentive.
Summarizing Wikipedia pages has been gotten down to a science, both for podcasts and YouTube explainer videos. This just makes it easier!
Agreed... and no offense to OP but I am now questioning just how in touch with modern society they really are.
Would they also observe a rocket launch from the grounds of the space center and go "eh, not really impressive" ?
Or maybe they are just defining "impressive" as something totally different to what we're thinking.
I think it’s “impressive” the first time you use it, but with subsequent runs it’s evident how formulaic it is. The end result, the personalities of the podcast “hosts” and their interactions are similar regardless of the context of inputs.
Basically it’s a neat party trick at the moment. I do hope to see it improve however!
At the risk of sounding cliche but this is the worst this tech will ever be. I find it equally scary and fascinating what lies ahead.
It’s incredible how high our expectations have become which really is a testament to the rapid development of AI.
Right?! We call this goalpost moving now, but it is not a new phenomena.
> It is interesting that nowadays, practically no one feels that sense of awe any longer - even when computers perform operations that are incredibly more sophisticated than those which sent thrills down spines in the early days. The once-exciting phrase "Giant Electronic Brain" remains only as a sort of "camp" cliché, a ridiculous vestige of the era of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. It is a bit sad that we become blasé so quickly.
> There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's Theorem: "Al is whatever hasn't been done yet."
This quote is from the 80s, from GEB by Douglas Hofstadter.
(and btw, I just took a grainy, poorly-lit picture from the book, and could automagically select the text from it, since I couldn't find the quote online. Imagine that tech in the 80s. Hell, it was bad even in the 2000s, with OCR being hit and miss for a long time. Now it "just works".)
The content is nothing that special these days, you could get it out of Gemini or Claude probably- but the audio affect is awfully convincing.
You can compare it to Google's Illuminate which also generates conversations by summarizing texts but in a much straighter, less fluffy way. It's less shallow but in some ways less compelling:
This is awesome, thanks for sharing
This was exactly my reaction to listening to the example podcast. Although, I wonder if the base material weren't so meta-level product overview, maybe it would be better. I do think the liveliness of the conversation was good (interjections, tonal variety, etc), so at least parts of the demo are impressive.
I was blown away by how impressive it was. I honestly thought it was real. I still can't believe these realistic audio capabilities are not being used for pure evil everywhere we look.
> like thrown into every sentence
I think that's actually part of why it sounds real, because tons of people do actually talk like that.
To me what would make it even better is the ability to throw in random jokes and utilize information about their surroundings and recent events.
I have been using MeloTTS for text-to-speech and I thought that was about the best we could do right now, but apparently I was very wrong. Is there an offline model one can download today that sounds as good as this NotebookLM?
Bark can sound as good, but Google is using SoundStorm which was specifically trained on dialogs. Surprisingly Bark can even sort of match it without being trained to do so, but not reliably. (https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386)
And SoundStorm has more than twice the context window of Bark so dialogs are a tight fit.
I just tried the default bark.cpp example from the github readme, and to me it still doesn't sound close enough to realistic, and the audio quality itself was a bit scratchy... maybe I'm doing something wrong.
When I tried my own text with it, it went completely off the rails... skipping completely over random words, and also switching to different voices in the middle of a sentence. Trying to run the large model also crashed entirely.
You aren't doing anything wrong - Bark out the box uses a randomly generated voice and I like to think it's modeling the world of random voices which includes bad microphones/audio-quality. (Even bad 'actors' - see how many Bark voices sound like they are reading a script.)
Presumably it was trained in noisy data. But it can generate and use a clean voice, they are in there. Most of the Suno default voices are not great either - but a great voice can sound perfectly clear. I haven't done much with Bark lately but on my Twitter there's plenty of clear examples of very realistic voices. Actually here I ran a prompt based on some copy and pasted test 20 times in Bark. I put a couple better results up front, but even in later samples you can find lots of evidence of human-sounding voices. https://sndup.net/bzhz5/
Going off the rails and hallucinating is a hard problem. It can be minimized, but probably would have to solved with simple brute force (check the output with S2T and retry if needed.)
For raw audio you can replace the final decoding step with something like VOCOS or MBD if you want to maximize audio quality, though you don't need do with the best voices.
Imagine showing this and your comment to someone 5 years ago.
It doesn't matter. It will become a carrier for ads and that's all that matters to those who use NotebookML to generate those podcasts.
It already feels more nuanced than the usual podcast.
If you get a "Service unavailable" message when trying it out, it means you are region locked because you're in the EU. Clear your cookies and use an American VPN to access it. Its very annoying, but at least the workaround isn't too much of a headache. Yet.
Don’t worry, the EU regulators will probably “fix” that workaround soon.
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.
Don't do this. A friend did this to me, and after listening to it, I suddenly realized it was AI vomit. My friend wasted an hour of my attention, and I didn't appreciate it.
I asked a friend if they had any ideas about something, and they asked an LLM, and it's like... If I wanted an LLMs answer, I'd ask it myself. I want your answer, distilled through your experience and opinions...
If it was vomit, why did you spend an hour on it? People complain about 2 minutes of audio sometimes, I cannot imagine a full hour of an unknown podcast, it must have been quite interesting.
Because they assumed that there was a good reason that their friend sent it!?
I had a friend who did the same to me, I was sent a message asking my opinion on a tech topic. I spent 30min researching/reading to make sure my reply was accurate and then found out the question was generated by a LLM, and he just wanted to show off how good a LLM was.
It will color every interaction you have with that person...
If it was vomit, it will be recognized quickly, AI or not, not an hour of listening for sure; yes, even if it was sent by a friend.
I think you are leaving the human out of the loop. When a friend of mine recommends me something I'll lower my skepticism because I'm assuming my friend would not send me garbage.
If a random podcaster says "I've proved that P=NP" I'd say "no you didn't", but if a math professor sends me that same link I'll keep listening to see where this goes. And I've definitely read texts making wild assertions that only at the end were revealed as hit pieces and/or propaganda.
Even if you think your friend would only send good things, you would realize that something is vomit in less than an hour. I cannot understand someone listening to something for an entire hour and then whining that they waste their entire hour and it was vomit, you're not in a cinema, you didn't pay a ticket for it, you listen to something because you like it or move on.
Maybe they thought their friend wanted feedback, or something in return.
In that case i would listen to all of it aswell, otherwise i can't give honest feedback.
You can argue your point all day, it will not resolve their cognitive dissonance. No matter how convincing, high-quality or entertaining it was, no matter for how long they happily consumed the content: it's AI-generated, they hate AI, therefore it's vomit, period.
I read some of your other replies and I can't quite get a read on your line of reasoning.
The issue is we would give less attention to these things if it wasn't for the social credit the humans gave the vomit. So we engage in good faith and it turns out it was effectively a prank, and we have no choice but to value requests from those people less now because it was clear they didn't care about our response.
No one listens to an hour of actual vomit just because a friend sent it to them, you should value your time more if you do at minimum.
Probably spent an hour waiting for it to get to the good part. Haha!
I just gave it straight up erotica from an old Usenet post. The results are hilarious.
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...
FWIW, I put MS-DOS's IO.ASM into this thing, and it did indeed make a fun little podcast that understood the high-level context quite well.
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.
So like, a regular podcast then?
I tried feeding it the voynich manuscript but it's just erroring out
Make sure you check the last link in my first post. It's the nightmares of Philip K Dick
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...
Just my thought. I think to be actually useful, the model needs to allow the user to customize the flow of conversation to some extent.
In its current version, this causes so much cultural dissonance that it’s very difficult for me to listen.
At least to me the “hosts” appear to actively signal lack of competence in the field they are talking about.
Given that they are generated that is off course nonsense.
"Like" is a filler word I barely notice, along with lower key words like "right" or "uh uh". But the NotebookLM constantly exclaiming "Exactly" and "Precisely" stand out and are driving me a bit loopy. I wonder if you can prompt inject them away.
That’s one of the disfluencies the article mentions.
Instead of teaching AI to write so poorly we should be teaching people to write and speak properly.
With NotebookLM, I created a podcast using articles I write on DEV.to as input. It's an experiment, but the generated audio result surprised me.
"Code Quests" is available on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/7fyQhgEk8u54e7u0cRPQR3?si=1...
In this episode, NotebookLM AI talks about how AI tools like NotebookLM are revolutionizing content creation.
I know it's a little meta...
Link to the article used as input for this episode https://dev.to/joacod/from-articles-to-podcast-powered-by-ai...
Let's say the use case is that you want to get a light, conversational summary of some dense, technical articles while you're out for a walk. Even if you thought this service was awesome on day one, if you used this every day for a month, would you hate it by the end or not? It's neat, but I can imagine it becoming repetitive quickly, and the seams starting to show after the initial impression wears off.
This is really awesome, I just added my startup website as a source, which is a mess of data engineering content written a little bit by myself and mostly by chatgpt 3.5 one year ago. What I find really impressive, it reads the big SVG I have on the landing page, and create a story about a real world use-case scenario.
The result: https://intellistream.ai/static/intellistream_podcast2.ogg
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.
Apparently people are already spamming podcast sites with NotebookLM: https://x.com/ListenNotes/status/1840470094708899992
>do you have tools to detect if audio is generated by notebooklm?
>we’re seeing a rise in fake, single-episode podcasts submitted to http://listennotes.com using it.
Here is a list of adverb/adjectives from that page: "surprisingly, astonishingly, deep dive (s/delve/dive/), effectively, honestly, actually, realistically, finally". What is actually happening: endless yapping. Both in podcasts and this article.
- "Hold up. What if I say that sky is not blue?"
- "Whoa, I did not even think about it. "
- "Wait, so if the sky isn't blue, what color is it then?"
- "Maybe... it's invisible? Like, we can see through it, so technically it's not there!"
- "Exactly. This idea is revolutionary, right?"
- "Bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla"
I bet the comment above was produced by generative AI.
I wrote a blog/newsletter/post/whatever about my experience. Absolutely experienced the wow factor as well.
What was more interesting was the word-for-word accuracy.
I fed all of my posts year-to-date into NotebookLM and had it generate the podcast. The affect/structure was awesome.
But I noticed some inaccuracies in the words. They completed botched the theme of at least one of my posts and quite literally misinformed in a few other spots. Without context, someone new to my posts and listening to the podcast would have no idea.
So, absolutely - wow factor. But still need content validation on top. Don't think any of you are surprised but felt it was worth emphasizing.
https://theteardown.substack.com/p/ai-expressing-empathy-fre...
I don't need the TTS part, but love how they create the text as a dialog between two non-expert humans. Any idea what a prompt for that would look like?
I just created the example podcast about the Bitcoin Whitepaper in NotebookLM:
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/9cf789be-1052-404b-8d...
And after, generated notes from the podcast:
https://podscribe.io/content/podcasts/101/episode/1727685408...
The podcast was exciting, however not really went to too much details.
Haha The example audio sounds like the guys from manager tools https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/the-single-most-effect...
Do people actually enjoy this type of AI-generated "podcasts" vs human-produced shows?
As a podcast listener, I lose interest if I can tell the audio is AI-generated...
If you had received one of these podcasts, say 3-5 years ago, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell it's AI generated. And I'm willing to bet it's valid for 90%+ of the people here, even those heavily involved in the field. The quality of the voices, the mimicking of umms, and ahhs, the subtle speaking over each other, they really are extremely impressive.
If you want you can do a test with people that haven't heard about the tech. Have it generate something you know they'll enjoy, maybe 2-3 min long, and have them listen to it without knowing it's AI generated. Ask them about the subject, and see if anyone mentions anything about being fake. You'll be surprised.
> 3-5 years ago, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell it's AI generated
You would however be able to tell that it was extremely obnoxious and bland, and without the novelty of the technical trick, you would not be listening to it.
Not true. I gave it a few documents and webpages of things I'm interested in and it was surprisingly engaging.
I strongly doubt that you're gonna be listening to this stuff recreationally once the novelty wears off, but if I'm wrong and you actually enjoy listening to two robots pretend to be excited about your documents and webpages long term, then have fun with that I guess.
I'm not really a podcast listener. I've listened to maybe 20 of over the past decade, but I sometimes hear my wife listen to some. I honestly couldn't tell that this one was AI generated and it wasn't immediately obvious (for me) from the site either. So I spent a few minutes making sure it actually was AI. To me it sounded a lot like most of the English podcasts my wife has listened to, a lot of those true crime ones and it frankly could easily have been one of the tech podcast that I've listened to over the years.
I imagine it'll be even harder to know if regular pod casters feed the AI a few episode they've made, to make it learn how to talk like they do. Like, would you really know if your true crime pod casters skipped a week if the AI sounded like them? I guess I don't really fall into the category for your question as I'm not a pod cast listener.
I think that’s the point - it’s increasingly more difficult to tell whether the content or parts of it are AI generated.
> As a podcast listener, I lose interest if I can tell the audio is AI-generated...
I've never naturally come across a podcast that's AI generated to have this reaction.
would you know it's AI if you didn't know going into it?
I actually find this alternative Google pdf-to-podcast service much better — it is less sensationalist and goes into more technical depth:
https://illuminate.google.com/home?pli=1
Currently only handles arxiv PDFs.
Personally, I would love to try this for learning languages.
Some people absorb information far easier when they hear it as part of a conversation. Perhaps it would be possible to use this technique to break down study materials into simple 10-minute chunks that discuss a chapter or a concept at a time.
Languages are hard. Everybody wants to learn them via an app or 10 minutes a day but realistically it's 3-4 hours a day for a year.
I am already doing that. What I meant is that there are specific topics, grammar, vocabulary, etc. that I would probably remember better if I also got them in the form of a conversation between two knowledgeable people.
3-4 hours a day for a year is not even realistic, unless it's a language that already has a lot in common with yours, like Italian and Spanish.
I just scraped this HN comments & blog post, fed them to NotebookLLM, and BAM! This podcast was born. Mind blown.
What are humans for, then?
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.
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.
Related discussion NotebookLM is quite powerful and worth playing with (54 points, 11 hours ago, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688804
Reminds me of GTA3 radio - can we retrofit this somehow? I miss driving around mindlessly and now we can get actual quality podcasts too.
I wonder which successful game will make use of AI generated content next.
Reminds me of Futurama news stories. Actually, what if NotebookLM could be customized to generate podcasts voiced by Morbo the Annihilator and his co-host Linda van Schoonhoven?
Still, I don’t hold much confidence on podcasts as knowledge transfer tools. It’s a nice gimmick with great voice synthesis, but it feels formulaic and a bit stilted from a knowledge navigation perspective.
Getting complex jokes right would be impressive for me. I don't have much of a sense of aesthetic for music and most art. A painting looks good, but I don't understand how I'm supposed to appreciate. Half my music could be AI generated, and I wouldn't notice if it's background music. An AI generated wine would taste the same to me as a $1000 bottle. But I think most people understand comic genius. Chapelle's jokes are far better than someone who is on stage to deliver a performance with predictable material. You could probably apply this to all other art as well. A rap artist will recognize the genius of one artist vs another one who is cranking out junk. As with writing. As with music. I think we're still in that stage where we're impressed the AI can do anything at all.
> Chapelle's jokes are far better than someone who is on stage to deliver a performance with predictable material.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan, but you don't have to look far to see that this opinion is not universal
You're right. Chappelle is controversial, and many rightfully abhor his material. However, I think you can look at the structure of his jokes objectively rather than the content. Obviously, you can't say all his material is like this. But the well paying shows are brilliant IMO. I appreciate his creativity compared to many other comics. Comedy is hard. That's why I said good comedy from bots is where I would really be impressed.
It is perfect to transform a complex article to a sort of socratic conversation, which helps to digest the topic much easier. Very helpful and fascinating.
Lawncareguy85, the creator of the viral "Podcasters discover they are AI" podcast has some other fun creations in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1fs7ka3/noteboo...
It’s hard for me to believe that this isn’t two real people talking. The only complaint I have is that they say “like” a little too often.
I fed it some info about my UX mobile app. Some parts are very cringe, extremely positive, but in the end it went on to brainstorm a potential 'next step' feature that was quite creative; letting end-users test-out prototypes during the wire-framing process. Also some more marketing-like text like "It's like drawing on napkin, but the napkin in your phone". I like that.
So as a brainstorming tool, it's a nice low-effort way to get some new perspectives. Compared to the chat, where you have to keep feeding it new questions, this just 'explores' the topic and goes on for 10 minutes.
Who wants to listen to this? Is there seriously a market for non-human hosts?
For me, it all depends on the quality of content. If it's good I wouldn't care by whom it was generated. The podcast thing is impressive, but not quite there yet. But I could imagine that this will change in the next few years.
Like... probably... like not.
Ok, so, this is my impression from shoving philosophy texts into it.
For things that already have a large body of scholarship, and have a set of fairly solidified interpretations, it is very good at giving summaries. But for works that still remain enigmatic and difficult to interpret, it fails to produce anything new or interesting.
It seems to be a more complex version of ChatGPT, but it has the same underlying problems, so its not useful for someone doing academic work or trying to create something radically new, as with other LLMs in the past.
I thought it goes without saying that these types of things depend on existing data. It seems useful to learn about something on your walk or commute but not take your research to the next level.
I'm just saying that, just like other models, it appears at first to have a great deal of use value but in actuality it only works for small edge cases and on things that you can find easily yourself without the model.
> which is it generates an outline, it kind of revises that outline, it generates a detailed version of the script and then it has a kind of critique phase and then it modifies it based on the critique
I’m seeing this to be true in almost every application.
Chain of thought is not the best way to improve LLM outputs.
Manual divide and conquer with an outlining or planning step, is better. Then in separate responses address each plan step in turn.
I’m yet to experiment with revision or critique steps, what kind of prompts have people tried in those parts?
They've really nailed the back and fourth of the two speakers!
It would be interesting to know if it's multimodal voice, or just clever prompting and recombining...
I added single voice podcasts to Magpai after seeing how useful this was. Allows for a bit more customisation of the podcast too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEsh9MlbA6s
I've got a daily podcast of hackernews being generated here too: https://www.magpai.app/share/n7R91q
It's almost certainly Google SoundStorm, a traditional TTS trained on dialogs from last year: https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386
Its.. like ... Like... Whatever... Like... Uh....
This is awful.
Not too excited for this from a practical view but technically it’s pretty impressive
It's impressive, but it also feels like "slop". It somehow manages to make whatever content you give it feel more hollow. You can tell it doesn't "think" about the content. I am scared that this will be shoved in my face everywhere.
Podcasts and chat are interesting, but the real potential in this would be to synthesize new documents from the inputs. Apply the information gleaned from the study materials to a user scenario and output a new work of fiction.
I was building out something along these lines and the voice was just rubbish (I mean, sounded fine for one short episode but won't on the 20th episode) at the time, so postponed to focus on more near-term goals. But the variation in voices here is quite a bit better, and will improve. You know this is going to be a thing.
There are still some extremely challenging/interesting problems to make it not terrible. This is where we get to invent the future.
am I the only one surprised by by how much the example sounds so much like the "Money Stuff" Podcast? E.g. the male host going low with his voice and the female host using a more informal speech pattern. I wonder if it's just a perception thing.
I think it's just a common format for podcasts. Sounds exactly like 'No Stupid Questions' to me.
The combo of this, AI generated images and AI generated garbage articles and blog posts will completely destroy the internet. This will be fun to watch. What happens after is going to be interesting.
What happens when all our search tools are completely unreliable because it's all generated crap?
I'm already telling my kids they can trust nothing on the internet.
How much of HN now is AI bots?
My first instinct was to not see why one would want to consume such a podcast, a simile instead of either the original or an (AI?) summary of the original. Then I remembered a partially disabled friend who regularly asks for audio books, because he physically cannot read long form. This, condensed, output would make a lot of ideas accessible to him.
Ah, I see someone who doesn't commute by car
This is better than I expected.
I sent the podcast audio to friend, and English is not their first language. Without telling them it was AI generated.
They found it entertaining-worthy enough to listen to the end.
Sure it needs more human unpredictably and some added goofiness. Maybe some interruptions because humans do that too. But it's already not-bad.
I like how he says not robotic sounding podcasts but then does sound a bit like a robot.
I didn't listen further in to see if it was a robot or just that he was American (I may later though).
The male voice really reminds me of CGP Grey.
I can't help but think how much this will continue the 'enshittification' of the internet. The problem with this tech is that people will release these 'podcasts' and drown out all the human-made content that most people want to listen to. It's not that this tech is bad in itself or that it doesn't have uses, it's that we have no social feedback mechanism for getting people to stop producing this kind of content!
Anyone else thinking that the male voice sounds suspiciously similar to Dax Shepard? I generated one of these podcasts last week and that was the first thing I noticed. I haven't seen any reporting on it.
This is mind blowing !!
It has always been hard to find quality entertainment if you have some standards... I am sure some countries have actual quality folk music. My country doesn't And whenever I switch on (by accident) a local radio station I end up cringing. I submit, those people that consume such content already, will not notice when AI takes over. They haven't noticed in the past, and they will not notice in the future, that they are fed crap 24/7.
Now make one that produces an actually effective professional lecture audiobook rather than an unprofessional podcast.
Why are they saying "like" so much in the example?
I liked their example; it's so meta
what fresh hell are we creating?
Remember how in Fahrenheit 451 Montag's wife surrounds herself in her parlor, walls decked out with massive TVs running an interactive 24h soap opera?
That seems the direction we're headed in, and some people say the zipbombers can't come soon enough.
Ladies and Gentlemen, let the race (to the bottom) begin!
While the vultures will shit out AI generated garbage in volume to make ever diminishing returns while externalizing hosting cost to Youtube and co, actual creators will starve because nobody will see their content among the AI generated shit tsunami.
Finally the AI bros are finishing the enshittification job their surveillance advertising comrades couldn't. Destroy ALL the internet! Burn all human culture! Force feed blipverts to children for all I care, as long as I make bank!
I guess it's easiest to destroy culture if you didn't have any to begin with.
Coming soon, "Late Night With Google AI"?
I've always found podcasts like this boring and uninspiring. In fact, I'm starting to see a pattern: the less I like something, the more likely it can be done well with AI. But I know I'm the minority as so many seem to be ok with filling their lives with "content".
I supposed that also applies to blogs, especially to those featuring a relentless positivity.
I've been seeing loads of these pop up on YouTube at the moment. Granted, it's probably because I'm clicking on them and YouTube is serving me more, but it does seem that some people (non-technical folk or kids) might not realise they are AI generated and who knows, perhaps soon one of these podcasts will actually be rather popular.
Personally I think the flow of the conversation is lacking a bit right now. To me it still sounds like two people reading off a script trying to sound like podcast hosts. I guess that's because I'm picking up on some subtle tonalities that sound off and incongruent. Still impressive though.
I think a great use case for it would be education. It would make learning textbook content far more engaging for some children and also could be listened to on the bus or in the car on the way to school!
Jesus it's good. I gave it some of my travel blogs, and wow. I mean, there are flaws, particularly in the shallowness of the analysis, but it's at least as good as some time-poor podcast hosts would do.
TBH Im wondering is there anyway to increase the depth or approach by prompting a model for it? Will that be in a future release or hybrid product? ( The audio tech is seemless 100% perfect ) its the quality of the content that needs work now, is there no way to plug this into another LLM ?
NotebookLM on everyone lips, so these are llm powered notebooks ?!