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NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

simonwillison.net

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Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#11

Post by infogulch »

ColinEberhardt wrote: post #3

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 Honestly, given the personalization maybe it's a net improvement.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#12

Post by modeless »

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.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#13

Post by roywiggins »

infogulch wrote: post #11
ColinEberhardt wrote: post #3

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 Honestly, given the person…

Summarizing Wikipedia pages has been gotten down to a science, both for podcasts and YouTube explainer videos. This just makes it easier!

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#14

Post by ranger_danger »

infogulch wrote: post #11
ColinEberhardt wrote: post #3

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 Honestly, given the person…

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.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#16

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

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.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#17

Post by whyenot »

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.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#18

Post by JonathanFly »

ranger_danger wrote: post #5
ColinEberhardt wrote: post #3

I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence. Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.

I 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 informati…

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.

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