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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

#391

Post by gaieges »

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…

People care about being able to consume information in ways that works for them.

I don't have time to read white papers (nor am I very good at it), but want to know what they consist of. I also want to take my dog for a walk which is hard to do while staring at a screen. This, and other tools like it are useful in achieving that.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#392

Post by beefnugs »

collinmanderson wrote: post #362
llamaLord wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, LLMs are probably inherently limited, but the AI field in general is not necessarily limited, and possibly has the potential to be more genuinely creative than even most exceptional creative humans.

I loosely suspect too many people are jumping into LLMs and I assume real research is being strangled. But to be honest all of the practical things I have seen such as by Mr Goertzel are painfully complex very few can really get into.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#393

Post by joe_the_user »

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

This sentiment feels overly dismissive about the possibilities here.

No, I see the gp as talking about the possibilities of this technology - it's possibility to waste someone's time. The problem, in a sense, isn't just that it's injecting simple content with "fluff" but that the fluff is formulaic. Listening to a human speak in awe struck tones about "magic" give the listener at least a sense that a real person was convinced by X. Listening to simulation of this, you lose the filter of the real person.

Of course, this is just the automated continuation of the existing standard of talk show hosts who gush over whatever is placed in front of them so it's just one more step down the general mediocratizaiton of the world, not a special step. But it still is a step in that direction.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#394

Post by chefandy »

quest88 wrote: post #385
chefandy wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

> 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 agree there will be winners and losers of some proportion here. But I also think the people that want to pay for art will continue to pay as their motives and values are different. There's plenty of cheap knock-off art, but people still…

> But I also think the people that want to pay for art will continue to pay as their motives and values are different.

The big difference is the type of artist. People selling fine art won't be affected much. The vast majority of artists are commercial artists, the the idea that being a commercial artist is morally or creatively bankrupt— a common sentiment among those who want to imagine that this is all just fine— is nonsense. It's pilfered commercial artwork that makes up the bulk of these tools commercial utility, and the people that made it stand to suffer the most.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#395

Post by bongodongobob »

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…

Completely backwards. There is no obvious score function for Go. That's how AlphaGo broke through, it was able to figure out a scoring method to actually accurately gauge how well it was doing so it could learn and improve.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#396

Post by swyx »

Merik wrote: post #43
JimDabell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don’t think it’s much of a threat to actual podcasts, which tend to be successful because of the personalities of the hosts and guests, and not because of the information they contain. I wonder if any “blended” podcasts will pop up, where a human host uses a tool like this for an artificial cohost.

Latent Space AI Engineering podcast does this with an AI cohost; mostly for intros and segues. A recent episode used it to summarise a Twitter AMA and while it’s usually used to good effect, that one was one of the first episodes the quality of the co host part was lacking, as it mispronounced things, and was a bit muddled in parts. That said, the podcast has been an incredibly useful and insightful regular listen fo…

hey that was me! yeah we've been amping up the ai content in the pod as you see, hopefully experimenting in tasteful ways.

I'm not super proud of the Twitter AMA one and if u listen back now i fixed many of the bad cutovers. I doubt i'll repeat it again on current tech.

thank you for listening! feedback and ideas welcome.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#397

Post by chefandy »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #369
chefandy wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

Have you never in your life enjoyed a pirated movie, game, book or music track?

Sure, and it wasn't the right thing to do, especially if it was from an independent artist. I haven't in well over a decade. There's also a canyon of a difference between that, and if I had re-sold their product, at scale, effectively putting the artists out of business. I'd love to explode copyright, but unfortunately, our society has no mechanism for compensating the people that make this valuable work without it, because a whole bunch of tech execs will say "jeez — i'd really like to get paid for their work instead of them."

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#398

Post by FeloniousHam »

chefandy wrote: post #274
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 the…

When I was younger, piracy was justified with similar tech folks arguments: "Information wants to be free", "Serves them right for controlling their content in a way that inconveniences me", "If I own a copy, the content is mine to share".

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#399

Post by mronetwo »

rafram wrote: post #365
mronetwo wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. It's just that our brains are so fried by our smartphones/social media/24h of news/media consumption that we've lost the plot.

It's unlikely that some people prefer to learn by listening to discussions?

You can prefer many things, but yes, it's unlikely there are people for whom listening two people talking is a good way of learning.

Re: NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

#400

Post by chefandy »

tivert wrote: post #387
chefandy wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

> 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. This, times a million. Add to that the ancient quote from Plato(?) criticizing writing or the other ancient quote complaining about the irresponsibility of the youth, unthinkingly deployed to attempt to delegitimize any kind of critique of nearly anything.…

It's one of the reasons I left tech altogether after decades. It's like most people in the tech business right now think their totally unique supreme intellectual might gives them enough pan-subject-matter expertise. The further I moved away from development within the business, the more it repelled me.
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