NotebookLM: The Uncanny Valley

1

I found an article about NotebookLM https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/ today and decided to give it a try. I took my old “Why I Transitioned Away from Xojo” post and ran it through NotebookLM with zero modifications. The result is at https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/643754bf-416d-4b3a-84c6-823aa025e83c/audio.

Initial thoughts:

  1. It’s not perfect but it does a decent job of getting the point across.
  2. The multiple hosts, voice inflections and imperfections are pretty good and relatively convincing for at least a while.
  3. Pronunciation isn’t always perfect but then how many variations of Xojo have you heard over the years with people that not native English speakers?
  4. AI/LLM’s are going to change many industries in unexpected ways. Some good. Some bad.
  5. Be prepared (especially in the next month or so) for a lot of deep fakes.
  6. I don’t see myself ever using this again since I don’t do audio podcasts. But who knows what the future brings - especially if the price is right?

Your thoughts?

4 Likes
2

regarding your #4:
https://archive.is/bEcUT

by the way, i cant see your result cause I do not use google nor have a google account

3

I’ve already done some training for my company where the ‘people’ were AI/LLM created. You figure this is first generation so it’s only going to get harder to distinguish between it and real people.

1 Like
4

Holy moly.
It gets irritating how much the ‘presenters’ agree with each other, but I ran this past a couple of people and they were taken in.
I find it hard to tell these aren’t humans so much as overly bouncy presenters of the kind I usually avoid in podcasts.

5

“Most people probably never heard of lew jo.”

I wanna play a drinking game with how many errors pop up , but that won’t mix well with my meds. :smiley:

6

Med Bingo !

7

Wow. That’s a real taste of the future of content.

8

I’m late to the party but this is the first thing about AI that’s actually impressed me or given me pause. Bob – was this literally just a matter of giving it your post and letting it run with it, or did you do any tuning? The overview link seems to suggest you put in the “source”, press a button and done. If so … this is pretty impressive as a first cut implementation.

9

ya. Literally gave it the URL to the blog post and hit the button and that was their first pass. I did zero fine tuning.

2 Likes