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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

#261

Post by authorfly »

caulk wrote: post #120
authorfly wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Drifting off topic, but do you have any examples of those analysis/sitrep content creators you prefer?

All of the other commentators have replied with a good diverse set of YouTubers and included ones with biases from both sides; I'd recommend the ones they have linked. Some (take note of the ones that release information quicker) might be more biased or more prone to reporting murky information than others.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#262

Post by ZeroGravitas »

richardw wrote: post #45
timoth3y wrote: post #21

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, b…

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 ki…

I stumbled on a parody of Dan Carlin recently. I don't know the original content enough to know if it's accurate or even funny as a satire of him specifically, but I enjoyed the surreal aspect. I'm guessing some AI was involved in making it:

An American Quakening

https://youtu.be/wGpdxsgreOE?si=r7ef1vBOjIvqD_PQ

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#263

Post by tkgally »

Inspired by this discussion, I had NotebookLM make three podcasts based on very minimal input: a one-line proverb, pi to 15 digits, and a short list of the most common words in English (“the of and to a in for is on that ...”). Here are the results:

https://www.gally.net/temp/20240930notebooklmpodcasts/index....

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#264

Post by fhe »

lvl155 wrote: post #238
timoth3y wrote: post #21

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, b…

We’ve become so great at articulation and delivery of empty ideas. To a point, I completely block out people like these in real life. This is an entire career for many.

my first job out of college was at a big name management consulting firm... to riff on your point: yes, such is the entire career for many. and theirs aren't even such bad careers if one only considers money and prestige. two years there completely cured me of any illusion of positive correlation between prestige and intelligence. I used to wonder if the partners at the firm actually believed the bullshit they were spilling -- actually "delivering value" per consulting parlance. I get it that people do intellectually dishonest things just for the money... but the partners seemed to genuinely believe their chatgpt-esque text generation. In the end I figured it was a combination of self-selection (only the true believers stay for the years and make partner) and a psycho-hack where if you want to convince your client, you better believe it yourself first (only the true believers make good evangelists).

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#265

Post by sodality2 »

I decided to turn my philosophy class's readings into 'podcasts' to introduce and summarize the topics before fully sitting down and skimming for information I missed. It's been hugely helpful - sitting down and reading a 30 page PDF can be daunting/inconvenient, so having a lighter introduction in a more palatable audio format (during workouts, commutes, etc) is amazing. I even uploaded it to Spotify to share with classmates.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#266

Post by cglan »

roenxi wrote: post #177
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

cars have made us much less fit though...

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#267

Post by atrus »

DanHulton wrote: post #254
richardw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ki…

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 d…

AI has been so conflated with LLMs as of late that I'm not surprised that it feels like we won't get there. But think of it this way, with all of the resources pouring into AI right now (the bulk going towards LLMs though), the people doing non-LLM research, while still getting scraps, have a lot more scraps to work with! Even better, they can probably work in peace, since LLMs are the ones under the spotlight right now haha

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#268

Post by graemep »

authorfly wrote: post #90
richardw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ki…

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…

> He reads bullet points he has prepared, and makes predictable dad jokes in monotone, re-uses and reruns the same points, icons, slides, etc.

The presentation is a matter of taste (I like it better than you do), but the content is very informative and insightful.

Its not really about what is happening at the frontline right now. Its not its aim. Its for people who want dense information and analysis. The state of the Ukrainian and Russian economies (subjects of recent Perun videos) does not change daily or weekly.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#269

Post by anonu »

The audio output from NotebookLM is amazing - but I've heard probably a dozen audio outputs from it over the last week. At first listen the cadence, intonations, etc... are absolutely incredible. But then format quickly gets tedious as it all follows the same pattern.

In separate news: I've been looking into building a web publisher plugin that allows you to "save articles" and then generate a podcast for later listening. With summarization and more advancements in text-to-speech, this is getting easier to hack together something really compelling.

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