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Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

illuminate.google.com

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Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#71

Post by vanishingbee »

dlisboa wrote: post #12

One problem I see with this is legitimizing LLM-extracted content as canon. The realistic human speech masks the fact that the LLM might be hallucinating or highlighting the wrong parts of a book/paper as important.

Happens in the very first example:

[Attention is All You Need - 1:07]

> Voice A: How did the "Attention is All You Need" paper address this sequential processing bottleneck of RNNs?

> Voice B: So, instead of going step-by-step like RNNs, they introduced a model called the Transformer - hence the title.

What title? The paper is entitled "Attention is All You Need".

People are fooling themselves. These are stochastic parrots cosplaying as academics.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#72

Post by panarky »

smeej wrote: post #42
ertgbnm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the what you are trying to get out of a podcast. Most of the podcasts I listen to are because I want to learn something new in an entertaining format. I'm not listening to develop parasocial relationships with the hosts, so removing that element could be a good thing for me. Of course if you listen to podcasts because you like the parasocial aspect or the celebrity interviews, then yeah... Not really a poi…

I don't know that "parasocial relationships" are the primary reason people like having real hosts. I have a huge list of things I've managed to change in my life because I heard some other real person talking about how they were possible. Listening to these people over time and realizing there's nothing about them that's so special that it makes things possible for them that aren't possible for me gets me off my butt…

In the same way that corporations are people, my friend, AI-generated and AI-voiced summaries of works by real people are also people, my friend.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#73

Post by tjr »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8
freefaler wrote: post #3

Great idea. I wonder how long until we'd see a lot of "autogenerated" podcasts with syndicated advertising inside spamming the podcast space. Like with robovoiced videos on YT reading some scraped content.

Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.

I would be interested in seeing an AI developed to listen to auto-generated podcasts, removing humans from the equation altogether.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#75

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8
freefaler wrote: post #3

Great idea. I wonder how long until we'd see a lot of "autogenerated" podcasts with syndicated advertising inside spamming the podcast space. Like with robovoiced videos on YT reading some scraped content.

Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.

Lots of people follow bots on Instagram and Twitter, etc.

Why not follow bots on YouTube and Spotify?

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#78

Post by panarky »

culi wrote: post #39
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you listen to an auto-generated podcast? Seems like removing the humans from the equation kind of defeats the purpose.

Maybe not a podcast, but I've often wished I could listen to a paper or an article while on a long drive

A great way to learn something is to listen to a conversation among two to four well informed and articulate people, where each person has a memorable personality and each person has a different perspective about the topic.

This Google Illuminate experiment shows how just listening to two voices discuss a technical paper for three minutes is far more effective than reading a three-minute AI summary of the paper.

Imagine if there were three or four voices, with varied personalities, more humor and sarcasm, different priorities and points of view, and even a little disagreement.

Then imagine you're not just listening to the conversation, but you're participating in it. That seems like a pretty amazing way to learn.

Re: Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio

#80

Post by SeanAnderson »

I'm fairly excited for this use case. I recently made the switch from Audible to Libby for my audiobook needs. Overall, it's been good/fine, but I get disappointed when the library only has text copies of a book I want to listen to. Often times they aren't especially popular books so it seems unlikely they'll get a voiceover anytime soon. Using AI to narrate these books will solve a real problem I experience currently :)
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