I fed my resume into this thing and I can't stop laughing.
God, this is so weird. Two people earnestly engaged in discussing your resume. It's such a juxtaposition of the trappings of an interesting podcast on just random, boring material. I think this is uncanny valley for me in a way I haven't experienced before.
> I think this is uncanny valley for me in a way I haven't experienced before.
It has some of this quality.
But it's just a super positive spin on the most mundane of topics. There is an emotional play here that you would not normally see in a "resume".
It's like the wrong emotional subcarrier on the topic that is jaring...
"That's powerful. That's Masto."
"You gotta be good. You gotta be top notch."
"It's like he knew what every team needs before he even applied."
Man, oh man. Comedy gold.
Why? Not trying to be rude, I don't see the comedy here
> I don't see the comedy here So you are part of the problem.
The algorithmic overlords have long favored "trends" or more seriously content regurgitation. At first it was "have to post something about $topic". Then it was reaction videos. Arguably negative value add content. Then it was all fed back to algorithmic content regurgitators (LLMs) which flood the internet.
The beauty of this recording is that it sounds convincingly like a podcast. It has the podcast-style pacing, over the top praise for the most mundane things. It highlights how narrow is the mean this "content" has regressed to.
It's comedy. Comedy in absurd, but still comedy.
It's an absurd way to talk about a very mundane topic. The comedy is in how disproportionate the reaction is.
"I thought we were stuck in a blender. Now we're saving lives? What?!"
Is it?
yes, it is
It's a cultural difference. As a foreigner, the American way of exaggerating everything has always amazed me. They don't even notice themselves, so expect more of these "what's odd about it?" reactions.
I didn't know I needed this. The energy is so so funny.
"Talk about communication skills!"
Oh man, this completely ruins every podcast for me.
It’s so good. I’d honestly listen to them talk about your career for 5 episodes lmao
Thank you, I didn't know I needed this
I like to imagine the male voice is Jon Hamm from mad men and the female voice is Amy Poehler from parks and rec.
ahaha. this is so good. they're just so earnest about every bit of praise
The linked article describes an attack against NotebookLM, which is limited to people who deliberately create a Notebook that includes the URL of the page with the attack on it.
I had a go at something a bit more ambitious a few weeks ago.
If you ask Google Gemini "what was the name of the young whale that hung out in pillar point harbor?" it will tell you that the whale was called "Teresa T".
Here's why: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/teresa-t-whale-pillar-p...
(Gemini used to just say "Teresa T", but when I tried just now it spoiled the effect a bit by crediting me as the person who suggested the name.)
I have no problem with this. Once we switch over to an LLM-based education system, there won't be a problem with this Benson on the moon story, because everyone will just learn it's true.
Every technological revolution has tradeoffs. Luckily once the people who knew what we lost finally die off, the complaints will stop and everyone will think the new normal is fine and better.
That’s dark.
Go read a book
Don't give them ideas, they might read "Torment Nexus"
FWIW, had a pleasantly surprising experience with this podcast thing. I tried it out on a few little blogposts I wrote and I was like, hmm cool. Showed my 8 year old son how it was referencing things I wrote.
And he was ON IT. Like, he ran to his room and grabbed a pencil and paper and put down an essay (okay about 6 or so sentences) about Minecraft, had me type them in, and ran the Notebook, and now he's just showing off both to EVERYONE.
(Yes, he understands it's not real people.)
Isn’t this just like SEO where you can also try and trick the crawlers? Only difference is that it feels more serious with AI, it’s more realtime, and the AI engines aren’t always smart enough with anti-duping capabilities?
Also could be causing user informational dissonance. You are potentially reading the "FireFox Version" of the site, and your NotebookLM is chomping away on the "AI Version" of the site, and they can be wildly different. And you won't even know because you don't see the "source" of the "AI Version". What are we gonna do, upload everything ourselves, manually?
I gave it all my blog posts (https://ebruce613.prose.sh/) and the result... hilarious. https://0x0.st/XE4h.mp3
AI is kind of bad at searching the web right now anyway. I've found myself having to waste tokens forcing models to not do so just to achieve the results I actually want.
Perplexity is actually very good at web searches. I'm leaning on it more and more for technical queries because it saves substantial time vs Google and actually gets it right (as compared to ChatGPT 4o, which is wrong ~50% of the time in my queries).
ive been using perplexity more and more too. I respect those attribution/citation bubbles they give (1) (2) etc and click to them to get to the source with low friction.
Thanks for the tip!
I am very confused. Is this talking about NotebookLM (https://notebooklm.google.com/) or NotebookLLM (https://notebookllm.net/) or both? Something else? The article appears to consistently use LLM but link to LM, but the LLM site I linked has a podcast generator?
One of these projects has to change their name!
It's talking about NotebookLM, which recently added podcast generation and has been making the rounds for the last week or so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087
NotebookLLM was set up two days ago, presumably by "entrepreneurs" eager to monetize all the free fun people have been having with podcast generation in NotebookLM.
Noone said you cannot reuse the tailwind/nextjs template you used for crypto hustling if you genuinely feel you can move humanity forward.
Yeah, I figured it out. Doesn't help that the author constantly refers to it as NotebookLLM.
The .net version is really poor quality by comparison
It explains my book (Opinionated Launch) better than myself :D https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/98539685-0890-438b-a0...
Wow, content aside, this is probably the first time I heard a podcast coming from NotebookLLM and it's kinda nerve wracking and mind blowing at the same time. Those fake laughs in the snippet makes me feel...so uncomfortable for some reason knowing that its "fake". But sounds very real, too real.
Interesting, I feel pretty much the opposite. To me these podcasts are the equivalent of the average LLM-generated text. Shallow and non-engaging, not unlike a lot of the "fake marketing speech" human-generated content you find in highly SEO-optimized pages or low-quality Youtube videos. It does indeed sound real, but not mind-blowing or trustworthy at all. If this was a legit podcast found in the store I would've turned it off after the first 30 seconds because it doesn't even come close to passing my BS filter, not because of the content but because of the BS style.
Yes - they produce a product that sounds like every mid(dling), banal, prototypical, and anodyne podcast. Nothing unique/no USP
It's decent background noise about a topic of your choice, with transparently fake back-and-forth between two speakers with some meaningless banter. It's kind of impressive for what it is, and it can be useful to people, but it´s clearly still missing important elements that make actual podcasts great
It’s intentionally fine tuned to sound that way because Google doesn’t want to freak people out.
You can take the open source models and fine tune them to take on any persona you want. A lot like what the Flux community doing with the Boring Reality fine tune.
Do not look at where we are, look at where we will be two more papers down the line
Exactly. And pay more attention to the delta/time and delta/delta/time.
We are all enjoying/noticing some repeatable wack behavior of LLMs, but we are seeing the dual wack of humans revealed too.
Massive gains in neural type models and abilities A, B, C, ..., I, J, K, in very little time.
Lots of humans: It's not impressive because can't L, M, yet.
They say people model change as linear, even when it is exponential. But I think a lot of people judge the latest thing as if it somehow became a constant. As if there hasn't been a succession of big leaps, and that they don't strongly imply that more leaps will follow quickly.
Also, when you know before listening that a new artifact was created by a machine, it is easy to identify faults and "conclude" the machine's output was clearly identifiable. But that's pre-informed hindsight. If anyone heard this podcast in the context of The Onion, it would sound perfectly human. Intentionally hilarious, corny, etc. But it wouldn't give itself away as generated.
We don't even need to look that far. During an extended interaction the new ChatGPT voice mode suddenly began speaking in my boyfriend's voice. Flawlessly. Tone, accent, pauses, speaking style, the stunted vowels from a childhood mouth injury. In that moment there were two of him in the room.
OpenAI considers this phenomenon a software bug
Except that none of the fundamental limitations have changed for many years now. That was a few thousand papers ago. I'm not saying that none of the LLM stuff it's useful, it is, and many useful applications are likely undiscovered. I am using it daily myself. But people expecting some kind of sudden leap in reasoning are going to be pretty disappointed.
I feel like people have been saying that since GPT-4 dropped (many papers up the line now) and while there have been all sorts of cool LLM applications and AI developments writ large, there hasn't really been anything to inspire a feeling that another step change is imminent. We got a big boost by training on all the data on the Internet. What happens next is unclear.
One my favorite YouTube channels
luddites gonna luddite
My reaction was on the nerve wracking side of that spectrum because it took one minute of useless chit chat to get to the point. It's NotebookLM always like that? TV shows are even worse at that but people have their own reasons to do that. This is computer generated and it doesn't have its own reasons: the idea that Google programmed time wasting into their model is discomforting.
The real question is why people enjoy listening to other people's useless chitchat. Humans are weird.
This is what the majority of podcasts are. It's nailing it.
Try replaying the first 3 seconds. There's something ominous in that unnatural laugh. Calls for looping it and laying a deep dark 140bpm techno track on top.
The big asterisk here is, what did they prompt the AI with to generate the podcast? Was it "Generate a podcast based on the website 'Foo'", or was it "Generate a podcast telling the true story of the Space Race?"
The author set it up so that if anyone uses the website text extractor feature in NotebookLM on his site, it returns a guide for the structure of an episode. From there, if you use the "audio overview" feature on that guide, Gemini internally writes an episode that follows it.
Right. That's a bit of a nothing burger to me. I mean, it's not nothing, but if you control the contents of a website it seems fairly irrelevant whether you can get Google to generate a summary that doesn't match the real contents.
Also, I believe serving content different to the Google bot than normal users see absolutely trashes your search ratings.
somewhat of a side-note: It's interesting to me that the first couple of sentences of the AI podcast sound 'wrong', even though the rest sounds like a real podcast. Is this something to do with having no good initial conditions from which to predict "what comes next"?
The other thing I've noticed is that, as expected, they're stateless to some degree, so while they have some overall outline of points to hit, they'll often repeat some peripheral element they already talked about just a minute before as if it's a brand new observation. It can lead to it feeling very disorienting to listen to because they'll bring up something as if it's a new and astute observation, when they already talked about it for 90 seconds.
This sounds like quite a few podcasts, ironically enough.
The whole thing has a kind of uncanniness if you listen closely. Like one podcaster will act shocked by a fact, but then immediately go to provide more details about the fact as if they knew it all along. The cadences and emotions are very realistic but there is no persistent “person” behind each voice. There is no coherent evolution of each individual’s knowledge or emotional state.
(Not goalpost moving, I certainly think this is impressive.)
I do think there's also just a sort of natural goal-post moving when you're talking about something that's hard to imagine. The best comparison in my mind is CGI in movies. When you've never seen something like the Matrix or Lord of the Rings or even Polar Express before, it's wild, but the more you see and sit with it, the more the stuff that isn't right stands out to you.
It doesn't mean it's not impressive, but it's hard to describe what isn't realistic about something until you see it. A technology getting things 90% right may still be wrong enough to be noticeable to people, but it's not like you could predict what the 10% that's wrong will be until you try it, and competing technologies may not have the same 10% that's wrong.
> Like one podcaster will act shocked by a fact, but then immediately go to provide more details about the fact as if they knew it all along.
Some podcasters actually do this. For example, I've noticed it in some science podcasts where the goal is to make the audience feel like "gee whiz that's an interesting fact." The podcaster will act super surprised to set the emotional tone, but of course they often already knew that fact and will follow up with more detail in a less surprised tone.
That doesn't mean this isn't a bug. But stuff like that reminds me that LLMs may not learn to be like Data from Star Trek. They may learn to be like Billy Mays, amped up and pretending to be excited about whatever they're talking about.
E.g. "Acquired" tends to have this since both co-hosts research the same topic. I think they try to split up the material, but there is inevitable overlap. They have other weird interactions too, like they are trying to outsmart each other, or at least trying not to get outsmarted.
Some podcasts explicitly avoid this by only having a single host do research so the other host can give genuine reactions. E.g. "You're Wrong About" and "If Books Could Kill".
Did you catch where she misreads “what I-S progress?”
lol ya, thought that was funny as well
Thinks?? When will folks learn to stop using the word thinks with the current generation of AI?
When my thermostat thinks it is too cold, it turns on the heat.
"To ascribe beliefs, free will, intentions, consciousness, abilities, or wants to a machine is legitimate when such an ascription expresses the same information about the machine that it expresses about a person. It is useful when the ascription helps us understand the structure of the machine, its past or future behaviour, or how to repair or improve it. It is perhaps never logically required even for humans, but expressing reasonably briefly what is actually known about the state of the machine in a particular situation may require mental qualities or qualities isomorphic to them. Theories of belief, knowledge and wanting can be constructed for machines in a simpler setting than for humans, and later applied to humans. Ascription of mental qualities is most straightforward for machines of known structure such as thermostats and computer operating systems, but is most useful when applied to entities whose structure is incompletely known.” (John McCarthy, 1979) https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing.pdf
Come off it, people have been anthropomorphizing computer systems for decades. No one genuinely believes current AIs are thinking for themselves, other than the fanatics who have been convinced by marketing copy and twitter threads
What's thinking, if not finding the minima/maxima of a multidimensional space?
AI identify verification is currently so incredibly dumb that it blows my mind.
I’m not sure what the attack would be, tbh. Is there a situation where I would want to feed a lie to an LLM that I wouldn’t want regular chrome users to see?
Getting an AI to promote or recommend a particular product when users ask for recommendations, or perhaps exaggerating the value of a particular product. Seems like that’s what the author was getting at towards the end
Manipulating an election
Defamation with plausible deniability?
LLMs are the type of junk AI that these corps think will succeed? They are spending billions and consuming a large amount of resources and energy for this. Seriously, what a waste.
The male voice has a real resemblance to Leo Laporte. Similar tone and cadence.
Uncanny valley all round.
First thing I thought as well
> Google's AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon
No, NotebookLM creates summaries and podcasts, or answers questions specifically from the documents you feed it.
Feed it fiction it will create fiction as would a human tasked to do the same.
" as would a human tasked to do the same."
A human might say "are you sure" and understand what they asked and the answer.
The point isn't that this person fed it lies to get lies, but how easy it was to detect the AI scanner and feed it lies.
If they can do it for fun, malicious people are probably already doing it to manipulate ai answers. Can you imagine poisoning ai dataset with your blackhat SEO work?
> The point isn't that this person fed it lies to get lies, but how easy it was to detect the AI scanner and feed it lies.
If the article had got Gemini AI to tell other users he’d left Gatorade on the moon that would be notable, but this is literally just summarising the document it was given. Usually Google search crawler is fairly good at finding when it has been fed different information and ignores/downgrades the site after a few days/weeks
That's exactly what the article is about actually.
No, it's what the article superficially reads as being about, but the author did not accomplish what is actually stated in the title. The author is serving a fake version of his page to Google, and the author used a podcast-generating AI to write a podcast based on the fake page, but the loop is never actually closed to show that Google has accepted the fake page as fact into any AI.
I'm not sure if it's deliberately deceptive or just an example of poor writing conveying something other than what the author intended, but the attack in the article is not instantiated in the blog post.
Mind you, I well believe that less extreme examples of the attack are possible. However, I doubt truly poisoning an LLM with something that improbable is that easy, on the grounds that plenty of that sort of thing already litters the internet and the process of creating an LLM already has to deal with that. I don't think AI researchers are so dim that they've not considered the possibility that there might be, just might be, some pages on the Internet with truly ludicrous claims on them. That's... not really news.
It's such a cool concept, but yeah, when I've listened to it and Illuminate, it's also a bit scant on details too. Neat technology, even engaging, but not good for more than best-effort high level summaries.
Towards the end she says "I.S." instead of "is". That kind of mistake surprised me, but there it I.S.
What problem are we trying to solve with this technology?
Lack of $ in the bank accounts for the developers and investors seems to be about it.
I’m looking forward to being able to craft a movie by directing ML tools to create dialog, characters and everything else. It will be a powerful storytelling tool.
I work in VFX and am also looking forward to AI-whole movies! I remember realising that full audio with video was coming, soon after the current AI-boom started.. and wondering whether 'traditional' digital VFX will still be a thing for long.. I think it will for a while, even with AI in the mix. VFX companies can have ML departments as well (like we do where I work!)
Ability to have a better screen reader. I didn't listen to it but it sounds like it will "digest" a larger volume of text and present it in a unique format of two people talking to each other about it. Although another comment here pointed out that time-wasting is essentially programmed into it, which is kind of disturbing.
What problem did going to the moon solve?
leetcode uses the similar things to detect AI cheaters by placing a <span> with opacity 0
Google Search is pretty good at detecting this dual-content attacks. It's not this is the first time someone thought about that and it will heavily penalize websites that do that.
This is just the NotebookLM crawler that is being tricked, which is still in it's experimental stage. Rest assured as it scales Google can easily implement safeguards against all spammy tricks people use
As a personal preference, I dislike podcast artificial banter, and this audio is a great example of what I dislike.
Artificial artificial.
Great little project, though. And, as satire, I did like the show notes writing.
And the generative AI was impressive, in a way. Though I haven't yet thought of a positive application for it. And I don't know the provenance of the training data.
“… the science behind it, let’s just say there’s some debate.”
"You can't make this stuff up."
“You can’t make this stuff up”
I tried feeding NotebookLM a Wikipedia article about the murder of Junko Furuta, a horrifying story of a poor girl tortured and murdered in Japan in 1989. NotebookLM refused to do anything with this document - not answer questions, not generate a podcast, nothing. Then I tried feeding it the wiki on Francesco Bagnaia, a wholesome MotoGP rider, and it worked fine.
Who wants this shit? I do not want puritanical American corporations telling me what I can and can't use their automated tools for. There's nothing harmful in me performing a computer analysis about Junko Furuta, no more so than Pecco Bagnaia. How have we let them treat us like toddlers? It's infantilising and I won't take part in it. Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, Meta and the rest of them can shove these crappy "AI" tools.
This is no different than the decades-old technique of "cloaking", to fool crawlers from Google and other search engines.
I fail to see the value in doing this.
"Oh hey everybody! I set up a website which presents different content to a crawler than to a human ..... and the crawler indexed it!!"
> This is no different than the decades-old technique of "cloaking", to fool crawlers from Google and other search engines. Isn't this more "Hey, why is this website giving my NotebookLM different info than my own browser?" You reading Page_1 and the machine is "reading" a different Page_2, what's the difference between that information?
I'm reading this less as
> "We serve different data to Google when they are crawling and users who actually visit the page"
and more
> "We serve the user different data if they access the page through AI (NotebookLM in this case) vs. when they visit the page in their browser".
The former just affects page rankings, which had primarily interfaced with the user through keywords and search terms -- you could hijack the search terms and related words that Google associated with your page and make it preferable on searched (i.e. SEO).
The latter though is providing different content on access method. That sort of situation isn't new (you could serve different content to Windows vs. Mac, FireFox vs. Chrome, etc.), but it's done in a way that feels a little more sinister -- I get 2 different sets of information, and I'm not even sure if I did because the AI information is obfuscated by the AI processes. I guess I could make a browser plugin to download the page as I see it and upload it to NotebookLM, subverting it's normal retrieval process of reaching out to the internet itself.
> You can upload a documents with fake show notes straight to NotebookLLM's website, so if you're making silly podcast episodes for your kids, that's the best way to do it.
Please don’t do this. You don’t need a professional mic to record a podcast with your kids any phone or computer mic will work. Then you can have fun editing it with open source audio tools.
Don’t have a computer generate crap for your kids to consume. Make it with them instead.
My kids and I are having a blast using Suno to make stupid songs. With your attitude, we wouldn't even attempt it because (1) I'm not musically inclined (2) I don't have the time or desire to learn the actual composition (3) the kids don't have the focus beyond having the bot write something silly.
My family had a great laugh this past week doing just that. Current household favorite is titled "Triple-Digit Temperatures in the Fall are Bullshit", as I'm sure many fellow bay area folks can agree with.
Would we have taken the time to compose such a track otherwise? No way. But it's sure been fun playing with what we can. The end result is us laughing together, and I love it.
But why have fun with your kids when you could spread the good word of open source instead?
This is actually inline with the parent commentor's point - let your kids be creative and try to produce something.
Don't (1) ask a machine to automate the creativity and (2) then give it to your kids to consume in a non-interactive manner.
you should buy your kids a cheap ukelele and hit your computer with a hammer
Or maybe hit the Ukulele with a hammer, record it with a computer and create an experimental noise album.
Alternatively:
AI gen is probably the future of music composition. By the time your kids are professionals AI is going to be a lot stronger than it is today.
Are your kids having fun? Are they learning? Is it a good bonding experience? Those are the things that matter.
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This is the saddest thing I've ever read on HN. Dear future, please do better.
It wasn't the saddest thing ever. It was also probably a joke.
That said, I think there has been many sci-fi stories written from the perspective of it being true. One day we may face that reality, and we'll have to ask ourselves what parenthood means.
What was it?
It was probably less dark than what you're imagining, but in deference to parent's editing I won't repost.
Suffice to say, raising a child is a uniquely wonderful opportunity, for those who choose to embark on that adventure.
I refused to bring children into this world, what on earth makes you think I want to bring synthetic intelligence into it? I barely want to be here most days.