Google has this new artificial intelligence thing out now called NotebookLM, and it’s a wild ride, man. Using your free Google account, you can upload a half million words of documents to a “notebook” for analysis. The AI can then generate summaries, FAQs, answer questions, and more.
One experimental feature will generate a “podcast” between two AIs discussing the contents of the notebook. As a test, I uploaded YouTube’s automatically generated transcript of my January 25, 2020, interview with Jay Haynes on the Live With Sensei show, which you can watch below.
That interview was a 1-hour, 8-minute livestream where Jay and his audience interviewed me about writing. NotebookLM synthesized that transcript into a 15-minute podcast, which you can also listen to below. The AIs seem to assume the roles of two beginning writers reacting to my interview. The voice acting is so good that it’s hard to believe these aren’t real people.
The AIs got a couple details wrong, such as alleging I sent Arthur C. Clarke my first novel, which I did not. I actually sent him a copy of one of my first published short stories, “Middle Passage,” but little flubs like these can be common in AI. And before you ask, I did read the privacy policy before uploading. Unless you thumbs-up or thumbs-down a generated response, your uploads won’t be used to train AIs.
Anyway, is this a form of mental masturbation? Sure. Will that stop me from loading the text of all my novels into one notebook and then generating another “podcast” where AIs discuss me as if I’m not even there? Of course not.
Enjoy this sample of AIs at work. And if you’re a beginning writer, I hope you pick up a couple pointers!