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

371–380 of 511 posts

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#371

Post by redleggedfrog »

sodality2 wrote: post #341
redleggedfrog wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go even further than "hold no value" and say it's actively detrimental on both the individual and society. We already have an avalanche of dehumanizing technology that isolates and placates us. We see the results of this with problems in mental health and socialization. This is a downward spiral as AI content will likely appeal to those who lack social skills as they don't have to cope with tricky vagaries of oth…

Even more catastrophizing. Do you get upset when you read the abstract from an academic paper? Or when you listen to a real podcast that does summarize a difficult topic in easier/shallower terms? Is it the fact that an AI summarized it the problem? Can you point to a real harm here, or will you just hand-wave, instead of seeing the reality of making information more available being a net positive?

Interesting. You have turned this around to be about me instead of the ideas. You must be good at arguing on the internet. I'm not.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#373

Post by 1-6 »

mdp2021 wrote: post #295
sodality2 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some insane catastrophizing. The value is that it turns it into a form factor that may be easier to consume, pay attention to, etc.

Since when industrial snacks are healthy food?

When I last checked, even healthy foodies occasionally enjoy shelf-stable snacks.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#374

Post by sqeaky »

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.

If you want to say AI have reached intellectual Excellence because we have a few that have peaked in specific topics I would argue that those are so custom and bespoke that they are primarily a reflection on their human creators. Things like Champions and specific games or solutions to specific hard algorithms are not generally repurposable, and all of the general AI we have are a little bit dumb and when they work well they produce results that are generally mid. On occasionally we can get a few things we can sneak by and say they're better but that's hardly a commodity that's people sifting through large piles of mid for gems.

There are a lot of ways if it did reach intellectual excellence that we could argue that it would make Humanity more mediocre, I'm not sure I buy such arguments but there are lots of them and I can't say they're all categorically wrong.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#375

Post by sodality2 »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #371
sodality2 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more catastrophizing. Do you get upset when you read the abstract from an academic paper? Or when you listen to a real podcast that does summarize a difficult topic in easier/shallower terms? Is it the fact that an AI summarized it the problem? Can you point to a real harm here, or will you just hand-wave, instead of seeing the reality of making information more available being a net positive?

Interesting. You have turned this around to be about me instead of the ideas. You must be good at arguing on the internet. I'm not.

Well, I'm just curious why you think something like this has negative value - I _do_ care about the ideas but you are the one who expressed that sentiment.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#376

Post by sqeaky »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #122
sqeaky wrote: post #55

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. If you just need voice discussing some topic because that has utility and you can't afford a pair of podcasters (damn, check your couch cushions) then having a mid podcast is better than having no podcas…

> 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…

I don't think you're logic follows that we need a lot of people suffering to get a few people to be excellent. If people with a true and deep passion follow a thing I think they have a significant chance of becoming excellent at it. These are people who are more likely to try again if they fail, these are people who are more likely to invest above average levels of resources into acquiring the skill, these are people who are willing to try hard and self-educate, such people don't follow a long tail distribution for failure.

If someone wants to click generate on a podcast button or image generator it seems unlikely to me that was a person who would have been sufficiently motivated to make an excellent podcast or image. On the flip side, consider if the person who wants to click the podcast or image button wants to go on to do script writing, game development, Structural Engineering, anything else but they need a podcast or image. Having such a button frees up their time.

Of course this is all just rhetorical and occasionally someone is pressed into a field where they excel and become a field leader. I would argue that is far less common than someone succeeding and I think they want to do, but I can't present evidence that's very strong for this.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#377

Post by gcanyon »

fooblaster wrote: post #347
gcanyon wrote: post #343

Anyone making the argument that computers/LLMs can only create mediocre content, and can’t (or it will take a long time to) create content that humans will find exceptional, needs to go back and read the commentary re: chess bots and go bots over the past ten or twenty years. We went from “computers can’t beat humans” to “okay, computers can beat humans, but they play like computers” to “computers are coming up with…

go is a game with an obvious score function which can be used to construct a loss, well defined moves, and total visibility of the board. It is less obvious how to write a score for creativity in art or music, nor does it have well defined bounds on what is considered a legitimate construct of either. Just because computing hardware lets you multiple matrices faster does not mean we have the means to solve all proble…

> go is a game with an obvious score function which can be used to construct a loss, well defined moves, and total visibility of the board

This is literally the opposite of true, and the main reason go computers were getting destroyed by humans for almost twenty years after deep blue took down Kasparov.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#378

Post by yeahwhatever10 »

double051 wrote: post #287
handelaar wrote: post #277

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 opinio…

This sentiment feels overly dismissive about the possibilities here. This is the first pass at a new user experience, and I find it already to be compelling to try for various subjects. Andrej Karpathy has been tweeting about it positively, and I believe he has a good intuition about these kinds of technologies. https://twitter.com/karpathy

I don't hate the product, but God I hate appeal to authority.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#379

Post by [deleted] »

handelaar wrote: post #277

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 opinio…

[deleted]

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#380

Post by gcanyon »

alwa wrote: post #366
gcanyon wrote: post #343

Anyone making the argument that computers/LLMs can only create mediocre content, and can’t (or it will take a long time to) create content that humans will find exceptional, needs to go back and read the commentary re: chess bots and go bots over the past ten or twenty years. We went from “computers can’t beat humans” to “okay, computers can beat humans, but they play like computers” to “computers are coming up with…

Is there anything to the notion that in Go, success and failure are concrete, objective, and more or less easy to measure (or at least measured along the same kind of rules)? While it is computationally intractable to iterate through future moves to an end state, it’s still relatively easy to understand how well you’re doing at any point, and you measure that in basically the same way every game. For some parts of la…

> it’s still relatively easy to understand how well you’re doing at any point

This isn’t true, and is actually a large part of why go computers were getting destroyed by humans almost twenty years after deep blue took down Kasparov. There were articles as recent as about 2012 despairing that computers would ever “get” go.

That said, relative to grading an essay, I’d tend to agree, go is easier. But that said, if the goal is to find the edge, so to speak: to figure out what “mundane” is and then go a bit beyond, that seems eminently possible for a computer to do.

Post reply on HN