Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 511 posts

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#271

Post by Workaccount2 »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #106
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…

The thing is, we have been here before. Think back to the mid-1980s and the first time everyone got their hands on a Casio or Yamaha keyboard with auto-accompaniment. It was a huge amount of fun to play with, just pressing a few buttons, playing a few notes and feeling like you were producing a "real" pop song. Meanwhile, any actual musicians were to be found crying in the corner of the room, not because a new tool h…

What is scary about AI is the speed of improvement, not what it currently is.

People keep forming these analogies/explanations with the inherent premise that what we have now is what AI is going to be - "It's actually kind of shitty so don't fret, not much will change".

AI music creation has improved more in the last 5 years than keyboard accompaniment improved in the previous 40 years. It would be very brazen to bet that the tech 5 years from now is hardly any better. Especially when scaling transformers has consistently improved outputs. Double especially when the entire tech industry is throwing the house at scaling it.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#272

Post by jimijazz »

At what point did AI-generated human speech become so remarkably realistic?

I recall just a couple of years ago when even the best models, like WaveNet, still had a subtle robotic quality.

What architectures or models have led to this breakthrough? Or is it possible that, as a non-native English speaker, I’m missing some nuances?

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#273

Post by llamaLord »

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…

IMO it seems almost epistemologically impossible that LLM's following anything even resembling the current techniques will ever be able to comfortably out-perform humans at genuinely creative endeavours because they, almost by definition, cannot be "exceptional".

If you think about how an LLM works, it's effectively going "given a certain input, what is the statistically average output that I should provide, given my training corpus".

The thing is, humans are remarkably shit at understanding just how exception someone needs to be to be genuinely creative in a way that most humans would consider "artistic"... You're talking 1/1000 people AT best.

This creates a kind of devils bargain for LLMs where you have to start trading training set size for training set quality, because there's a remarkably small amount of genuinely GREAT quality content to feed this things.

I DO believe that the current field of LLM/LXM's will get much better at a lot of stuff, and my god anyone below the top 10-15% of their particular field is going to be in a LOT of trouble, but unless you can train models SOLELY on the input of exceptionally high performing people (which I fundamentally believe there is simply not enough content in existence to do), the models almost by definition will not be able to outperform those high performing people.

Will they be able to do the intellectual work of the average person? Yeah absolutely. Will they be able to do it probably 100/1000x faster than any human (no matter how exceptional)?... Yeah probably... But I don't believe they'll be able to do it better than the truly exceptional people.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#274

Post by chefandy »

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…

> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.

Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs.

I see this sort of convenient resignation all the time in the tech crowd... "creative workers only can blame themselves for tech companies taking their income because their art just isn't any good anymore!"

The poor quality "content" that's been proliferating recently has been created, largely, using the very tools that AI has built, or their immediate precursors. AI, for all its benefits, has only made that worse.

If you're saying, in good faith, that most of the infomercials, televangelist programs, talk radio, celebrity autobiographies, self-help books, scandalous expose books, and health/exercise fad books etc etc etc that came out 50 years ago were made for no reason beyond advancing human knowledge, you're either too young to remember any media from before our current era and haven't looked beyond survivorship bias.

Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off. If their work was that awful, companies wouldn't be clamoring to vacuum it up into their models to make more of it. Nearly all of the salable output from these models exists solely because it took a creative product someone made with the intention of selling it and it's using it to sell a simulacra.

It's using nostalgia to deflect guilt for harpooning the livelihood of many people because it's just more convenient and profitable to empower mediocre "content creators" they use to justify doing it.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#275

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#276

Post by skapadia »

oddthink wrote: post #247
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…

It goes way too far, IMHO. It ends up sounding like a smarmy Sunday-morning talk show conversation, with over-exaggerated affect and no content. So far I've just fed it technical papers, which may be part of the problem, but what I got back was, "Gosh, imagine if a recommender system really understood us? Wow, that would be fantastic, wouldn't it?"

While it's impressive, I agree that it tends to make over the top comments or reactions about everything. It could probably make a Keurig machine sound like a revolutionary coffee maker.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#277

Post by handelaar »

So basically what you're all saying is how it's technically impressive. Okay.

It is also completely and utterly worthless -- an inefficient and slow method of receiving not-very-many words which were written by nobody at all.

The one and only point listening to a discussion about anything is that at least one of the speakers is someone who has an opinion that you may find interesting or refutable. There are no opinions here for you to engage with. There is no expertise here for you to learn from. There is no writing here. There are no people here.

There is nothing of any value here.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#278

Post by Workaccount2 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #152
shepherdjerred wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s incredible how high our expectations have become which really is a testament to the rapid development of AI.

Right?! We call this goalpost moving now, but it is not a new phenomena. > It is interesting that nowadays, practically no one feels that sense of awe any longer - even when computers perform operations that are incredibly more sophisticated than those which sent thrills down spines in the early days. The once-exciting phrase "Giant Electronic Brain" remains only as a sort of "camp" cliché, a ridiculous vestige of th…

I think this is just general human behavior.

Think about how comfortable your life is, and how the 17th century version of yourself would kill to live it. Then think about how you aren't in a perpetual state of ecstasy for being given this life.

People quickly adapt to their current circumstances, take them for granted, and immediately want more.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#279

Post by airspresso »

jp_nc wrote: post #240
tkgally wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same thing, running one book I edited and another book I wrote through it, and it did quite well. I was particularly impressed with how the “hosts” came up with their own succinct examples and metaphors to explain what I had written at much greater length. (I should mention that one of those books was in Japanese, and they captured it clearly in English.) Lately, when I just want to get the gist of a long a…

I dumped my kids weekly middle school update into it and it produced a nice summary that I could listen to while doing something else.

that's value add right there. Summarizing text into audio saves time.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#280

Post by agentultra »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #271
robinsonb5 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, we have been here before. Think back to the mid-1980s and the first time everyone got their hands on a Casio or Yamaha keyboard with auto-accompaniment. It was a huge amount of fun to play with, just pressing a few buttons, playing a few notes and feeling like you were producing a "real" pop song. Meanwhile, any actual musicians were to be found crying in the corner of the room, not because a new tool h…

What is scary about AI is the speed of improvement, not what it currently is. People keep forming these analogies/explanations with the inherent premise that what we have now is what AI is going to be - "It's actually kind of shitty so don't fret, not much will change". AI music creation has improved more in the last 5 years than keyboard accompaniment improved in the previous 40 years. It would be very brazen to bet…

... and it still won't be music.

The reason why people like music is because another person wrote and performed it. We like watching other people.

Give us an infinite playlist of elevator music and it just becomes oatmeal.

Post reply on HN