> 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.

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 kind of thing over.

https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU

Or hardcore history. The robots will get there, but it's going to take a while.

https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

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?"

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 had come along which threatened their position, but because non-musicians apparently didn't understand (at least immediately) the difference between these superficial, low-effort machine-generated sounds and actual music.

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.

I ran one of my papers into it, mind blown how well they dumbed it down without losing too much details (still quite a lot was ommitted). I wonder if it's domain specific, and I wonder what's the variance by topic.

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

I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days.

For example, most furniture pictures from the 60s and 70s are from upper middle class homes. If we listen music, we listen to Queen and not some local band from Alabama (not that I’m against such bands at all; they can make great music too).

But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance?

I would disagree it's trying to be a "quality" podcast. As usual with AI, it's an average over averages, incredibly mediocre, sometimes borderline satire. For instance, in this example podcast they say "and trust me, guys, you wanna hear all about this", which is where I would usually turn off, because nothing of quality can come after this sentence.

In my company, HR now uses AI to do training videos. It's hilariously funny, because it looks like a satire on training videos (well, granted, it's funny for a minute or two, then it shifts to annoying).

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

I was thinking this kind of thing is the perfect way to generate sports commentary.

> Most books published today have the affect of a book, but the author doesn't really have anything to say

This has been the case as far back as I began reading books which is about 30 years.

The same could be said of most technical blogs, they are just marketing content to sell a company service...Miss the old Internet...

I think the average person is more interested in the output than in the process e.g. more people want to read The Shining than want to read about how The Shining was written

Remembering the 90s when I grew up really into alternative music I think what has changed is maybe public perception. AI back then would not have changed much because mainstream pop music was already accepted as generic derivative existing only to make money. Quality was already seen as secondary to be successful. But nowadays maybe due to social networks incentives instead of journalists curation only numbers seem to matter.

I think it is right that people don't care and there is some merit to it.

Reading, or listening to podcast, these days is more akin to a meditation - many people do it to reenforce an identity rather than to expand on themselves.

And I do think that is reasonable as, for many people, there are few other structures that can keep them in check with themselves.

Thank you for saying that, it was always a background task thought, but now that you put it in words. This. The churn shall burn..

> the interesting thing is that most people don't really care

no one has gotten feedback from "most people" .. this is raw hyperbole

Yes, this is impressive, it has all the idiosyncrasies of podcasting, the pauses, turns of phrase, even the tones where we hear people putting things in quotes, etc.

... but it's also pointless. And it's likely different episodes on different topics will tend to sound very much alike; it's already the case here, I'm sure I heard another example where the two voices were the same.

In less than a year we all have learned to recognize AI images with pretty good accuracy; text is more difficult, but podcasting seems easy in comparison.

Well, yes. Replace the various music and book publishing mills with LLMs for even more low quality drivel filling the marketplaces because now even the already low barrier of having to actually pay someone to produce it will be removed.

That's definitely going to be an improvement. Not.

I thought this was a great, insightful comment, but noodling over it a little more made me think it's not just content producers who are responsible for this "quality vacuousness" epidemic.

I think this is just partly an inevitable consequence of going from "content scarcity" to our new normal of "content obesity" over the past 20 years or so. In this new era of an overwhelming amount of content, it's just natural to compare it all against each other, e.g. to essentially "optimize" it to the "best" form, but in doing that we've fallen into a homogeneity, and the resulting lack of variation is an actual lowering of quality in and of itself.

2 examples to explain what I mean:

1. I find that nearly all interior design (at least within broad styles) looks basically the same to me now. It's all got that "minimalist, muted tones but with a touch of organic coziness and one or two pops of color" look to it. Honestly, I don't know how interior designers even exist today, when it's trivial to go to Houzz or any of a million websites and say "yes, like this". A while back I was complaining online somewhere that I thought all interior design looked similar where in the past there was much more interesting variation, and somebody insightful replied that it's not really that interior design is now just the same, it's that it's really just converged. People can easily see and compare a million designs against each other, so there is much less of a chance for that green shag carpet to even get a moment in the sun.

2. I was recently on vacation and decided I wanted to read a "classic" book, so I read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (I'm not sure why I never had to read that in high school). Nearly throughout the entire book I couldn't help but thinking "Is there any time this book stops sucking?" I hated the entire thing - it was like being forced to watch someone's vacation photos for twelve hours straight, and I kept wondering why there never seemed to be any attempt to actually make me give a shit about any of the characters in the book, as nearly every one of them I found insufferable and wondered how they each had about 3 or 4 livers to spare. But I do understand that Hemingway's writing style was unique and original at the time, and that he was doing something new and interesting that influenced American literature for a long time. But these days, given the flood of content, it feels like most attempts at doing something "new and interesting" are not only forced, but nearly impossible given that there are a million other people also trying to do new and interesting things that now have the means to disseminate them. I don't think a book like The Sun Also Rises, where I believe the main impact was the style of writing/dialogue vs the actual story, could ever break through today.

I guess my point with this long post is that I think the "loss of quality" in content that many of us sense is just a direct result of there being so much content that we see variations from the "ideal" as worse, where in the past we may have found them interesting.

> the quality of the content is largely irrelevant.

But the content here has been fed into it deliberately.

it is the perfect milquetoast personality. It's like don lemon but without the interesting bits of don lemon. It has no draw or interest.

Podcasts are only somewhat about things. The most important part is that they're by people, and the people is what draws people in. These ai podcasts are not by people, and when you listen to more than one you start to see the patterns and void where a personality is.

yes, podcasting is a goto market strategy. One reason there are so many VC podcasts is because it is how GPs (VCs who fundraise) reach LPs (the money that invests in venture funds).

So your argument in anutshell is: humans have nothing to say, let's stop listening to them. Are you serious? It's ALL about what humans want to send out to the world, this is what it's all about. I'm perplexed that this isn't obvious.

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 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.

To take one example of where this is valuable:

- Take some dense research paper or other material that is unsuitable for listening to aloud

- Listen to it (via NotebookLLM) whilst commuting/washing up or whatever

This way you'll have a big headstart on what it's all about when you come to read the details.

I imagine in future we'll see a version of this where the listener can interject and ask questions too, that feels like a potentially very powerful way to learn.

There's definitely not nothing of value here. This could be a useful new medium. I however hate the tone of the two hosts. It sounds like two pompous millennials talking about things they don't really understand.

I feel like this is also exposing the same fundamental flaw with human created content of a similar nature.

Two attractive human "journalists" with nice speaking voices and fake rapport reading a script that was written for them is not really far off this.

I was about to say the only real benefit is that the AI voices won't start running for Congress on authoritarian lies or peddling anti-vax takes as the next step in their career, but thinking about it they probably already are being used for this already.

I often listen to podcasts when I go out for a walk. If this really works as advertised, it could be a chance to revise some material while I'm enjoying the weather (or, in this season, the rain... But you got my point).

I'm not sure what the name of this fallacy is, but I fall prey to it all the time: the fallacy that everyone else values what you value.

I can't stand fiction. When I read a self-help book, but it's laced with stories, I lose interest. Just state the point.

However, a lot of people find stories engaging and more effective, because they provide an example that they can use to relate to, like a myth.

I don't think this is worthless at all. It wraps information in an engaging presentation.

> 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.

No. Maybe that's true for you, but people enjoy learning in different ways, and some people learn best by listening to a discussion.

It's just format-shifting content. Rather than reading an article, someone might prefer to have the content casually chit-chatted at them. Nothing wrong with that, and a handy function if you're into that sort of thing. I can see uses for it.

Yeah they perfectly recreated the annoying useless podcast chat format!

Amazingly impressive but not actually useful.

I wonder why they wouldn't try to recreate a more useful format?

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 problems.

> I don't know what I would use a podcast like this for…

Say you need to read those instructions, but it’s also really nice out and you want to go for a jog: two birds, one stone.

Yeah I totally get people’s criticisms that the podcasts aren’t quite human-expert-level in terms of symbolic reasoning, but this still blows my mind. The intuitive skill these show, not to mention the ability to accurately (again, if shallowly) parse and transform huge bodies of content in seconds is absolutely scary, IMO.

I’d feed it the Singularity paper, but I’m not sure I need that extra boost of anxiety these days…

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

The prompt affects that a lot. If I input my writing and ask an LLM to “evaluate,” it will tell me how astute and intriguing my ideas are (often to the point of hyperbole). If I ask instead for it to “critique” me, I’ll get a much less complimentary response about the same content.

Must have been prompted to be an American podcaster.

Bring on the one that's all British and snarky!

This seems to be a common trait of a lot of the more "aligned", "helpful" LLMs out there. You can drop any random excerpt from your diary into ChatGPT and it will tell you about how brilliant, sensitive, and witty you are. It's really quite sickening.

> 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.

I think something like a Socratic dialog option would be useful as well.

It would be ideal if they made the SoundStorm model available via API.

Being able to automate words, I think, will reveal how important actual human connection is.

> We always start with a clear overview of the topic, you know, setting the stage. You’re never left wondering, “What am I even listening to?” And then from there, it’s all about maintaining a neutral stance, especially when it comes to, let’s say, potentially controversial topics.

Oh yeah, this is exactly why I listen to Oxide's podcast! (This is a joke. They often launch into topics with no explanation or context, and are unabashedly opinionated.)

The underlying NotebookLM is doing better at this - each claim in the note cites a block of text in the source. So it’s engineered to be more factually grounded.

I would not be surprised if the second pass to generate the podcast style loses some of this fidelity.

I did that as well: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/4a67cf10-dd3b-42b3-b5...

It's wild how different it is.

"and with over four hundred comments" not quite! Currently 295 comments.

I loved when they said they were going to play a snippet from a generated podcast and then some robotic male voice says something like "Insert audio snippet here".

Astounding. Content is going to quickly be devalued with these tools becoming so pervasive.

It has a robotic, monotonous vibe but that is gonna be easily fixable.

A prompt including a long list of specific flaws to look for would make it even more interesting.

This is very fun to listen to. Listening to the "hosts" commenting on the technology that created "them".

Look I agree with you at a certain level, maybe it can't emulate deep conversations about big topics (maybe it can, I haven't seen an attempt...), but a vast vast majority of podcasts and radio shows are just like this: shallow and incredibly simplified with no more than a nod to the underlying concepts. 70% personality, 20% dumb analogies that the producer thought up in thirty minutes, and <10% actually communicating the material is standard fare for normie podcasts, sadly.

Honestly, given the personalization maybe it's a net improvement.

I think it’s “impressive” the first time you use it, but with subsequent runs it’s evident how formulaic it is. The end result, the personalities of the podcast “hosts” and their interactions are similar regardless of the context of inputs.

Basically it’s a neat party trick at the moment. I do hope to see it improve however!

At the risk of sounding cliche but this is the worst this tech will ever be. I find it equally scary and fascinating what lies ahead.

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

The content is nothing that special these days, you could get it out of Gemini or Claude probably- but the audio affect is awfully convincing.

You can compare it to Google's Illuminate which also generates conversations by summarizing texts but in a much straighter, less fluffy way. It's less shallow but in some ways less compelling:

https://illuminate.google.com/home

This was exactly my reaction to listening to the example podcast. Although, I wonder if the base material weren't so meta-level product overview, maybe it would be better. I do think the liveliness of the conversation was good (interjections, tonal variety, etc), so at least parts of the demo are impressive.

I was blown away by how impressive it was. I honestly thought it was real. I still can't believe these realistic audio capabilities are not being used for pure evil everywhere we look.

> like thrown into every sentence

I think that's actually part of why it sounds real, because tons of people do actually talk like that.

To me what would make it even better is the ability to throw in random jokes and utilize information about their surroundings and recent events.

I have been using MeloTTS for text-to-speech and I thought that was about the best we could do right now, but apparently I was very wrong. Is there an offline model one can download today that sounds as good as this NotebookLM?

Imagine showing this and your comment to someone 5 years ago.

It doesn't matter. It will become a carrier for ads and that's all that matters to those who use NotebookML to generate those podcasts.

It already feels more nuanced than the usual podcast.

From what I can gather there are three virtual speakers in the one about Pi: the man, the woman, and a third voice whose only role is to say "yeah" once. If they were real people, that third guy would definitely feel left out.

But the one about common words almost gave me anxiety: listening to two people discuss nothing as if they had spent hours of research and had something important to tell is very depressing.

Cool voices, although I'm getting the same vibe I get when listening to radio announcers from the 1920s [1]. If this were a human I'd be convinced that they're parodying the genre.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/06/that-we...

The language one is quite insightful!

I tried it converting bureaucratic documents from Spain, even a paper sheet to just ask for holidays, and it created the funniest podcast I've ever heard. I'm glad I'm not the only one doing this stupid thing.

Just my thought. I think to be actually useful, the model needs to allow the user to customize the flow of conversation to some extent.

In its current version, this causes so much cultural dissonance that it’s very difficult for me to listen.

At least to me the “hosts” appear to actively signal lack of competence in the field they are talking about.

Given that they are generated that is off course nonsense.

"Like" is a filler word I barely notice, along with lower key words like "right" or "uh uh". But the NotebookLM constantly exclaiming "Exactly" and "Precisely" stand out and are driving me a bit loopy. I wonder if you can prompt inject them away.

That’s one of the disfluencies the article mentions.

Instead of teaching AI to write so poorly we should be teaching people to write and speak properly.

Don't do this. A friend did this to me, and after listening to it, I suddenly realized it was AI vomit. My friend wasted an hour of my attention, and I didn't appreciate it.

FWIW, I put MS-DOS's IO.ASM into this thing, and it did indeed make a fun little podcast that understood the high-level context quite well.

But when it makes references to such-and-such happening on line number X, and I go check line X, it turns out to be totally mistaken.

Apparently people are already spamming podcast sites with NotebookLM: https://x.com/ListenNotes/status/1840470094708899992

>do you have tools to detect if audio is generated by notebooklm?

>we’re seeing a rise in fake, single-episode podcasts submitted to http://listennotes.com using it.

If you had received one of these podcasts, say 3-5 years ago, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell it's AI generated. And I'm willing to bet it's valid for 90%+ of the people here, even those heavily involved in the field. The quality of the voices, the mimicking of umms, and ahhs, the subtle speaking over each other, they really are extremely impressive.

If you want you can do a test with people that haven't heard about the tech. Have it generate something you know they'll enjoy, maybe 2-3 min long, and have them listen to it without knowing it's AI generated. Ask them about the subject, and see if anyone mentions anything about being fake. You'll be surprised.

> As a podcast listener, I lose interest if I can tell the audio is AI-generated...

I've never naturally come across a podcast that's AI generated to have this reaction.

I'm not really a podcast listener. I've listened to maybe 20 of over the past decade, but I sometimes hear my wife listen to some. I honestly couldn't tell that this one was AI generated and it wasn't immediately obvious (for me) from the site either. So I spent a few minutes making sure it actually was AI. To me it sounded a lot like most of the English podcasts my wife has listened to, a lot of those true crime ones and it frankly could easily have been one of the tech podcast that I've listened to over the years.

I imagine it'll be even harder to know if regular pod casters feed the AI a few episode they've made, to make it learn how to talk like they do. Like, would you really know if your true crime pod casters skipped a week if the AI sounded like them? I guess I don't really fall into the category for your question as I'm not a pod cast listener.

I think that’s the point - it’s increasingly more difficult to tell whether the content or parts of it are AI generated.

would you know it's AI if you didn't know going into it?

I bet the comment above was produced by generative AI.

Languages are hard. Everybody wants to learn them via an app or 10 minutes a day but realistically it's 3-4 hours a day for a year.

Don’t worry, the EU regulators will probably “fix” that workaround soon.

I'm not normally one to require features in order to use, but this one is an absolute must for me.

> Chapelle's jokes are far better than someone who is on stage to deliver a performance with predictable material.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan, but you don't have to look far to see that this opinion is not universal

I was stress testing its filters by uploading taboo erotica writing and it definitely described it as "messed up". But it did in general just generate a meta-commentary on topics like voyeurism instead of addressing any content in what i uploaded which was 100% just a sex scene and nothing else, and was very apologetic for "fantasy writing" and how we shouldn't condone it (despite it clearly containing a situation that would be illegal in real life).

For me, it all depends on the quality of content. If it's good I wouldn't care by whom it was generated. The podcast thing is impressive, but not quite there yet. But I could imagine that this will change in the next few years.

Like... probably... like not.

It's almost certainly Google SoundStorm, a traditional TTS trained on dialogs from last year: https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386

I thought it goes without saying that these types of things depend on existing data. It seems useful to learn about something on your walk or commute but not take your research to the next level.

Ah, I see someone who doesn't commute by car

I think it's just a common format for podcasts. Sounds exactly like 'No Stupid Questions' to me.

I had a similar thought, although they had to make it talk and sound just like the stereotype of people there in the valley. Like, of course like, it has to sound, like, authentic, ya know?

On a side note, really great to see something innovative and useful! Google nails this on occasion and I think misses credit because the other appendanges are simultaneously laying eggs or deleting working/valued products from the portfolio. It's gotta be pretty hard to operate at that scale, but damn.

Remember how in Fahrenheit 451 Montag's wife surrounds herself in her parlor, walls decked out with massive TVs running an interactive 24h soap opera?

That seems the direction we're headed in, and some people say the zipbombers can't come soon enough.

TBH Im wondering is there anyway to increase the depth or approach by prompting a model for it? Will that be in a future release or hybrid product? ( The audio tech is seemless 100% perfect ) its the quality of the content that needs work now, is there no way to plug this into another LLM ?