[HN Gopher] NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are su...
___________________________________________________________________
NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly
effective
Author : simonw
Score : 810 points
Date : 2024-09-30 02:58 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| jmugan wrote:
| I just made a podcast episode about my company where I work by
| giving it the website. It was surprisingly realistic. It also
| made me realize how empty many podcasts actually are.
|
| I sent it to my colleagues telling them I "had it produced." I'll
| reveal the truth tomorrow.
| bartvk wrote:
| 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.
| GaggiX wrote:
| If it was vomit, why did you spend an hour on it? People
| complain about 2 minutes of audio sometimes, I cannot imagine
| a full hour of an unknown podcast, it must have been quite
| interesting.
| Ardren wrote:
| Because they assumed that there was a good reason that
| their friend sent it!?
|
| I had a friend who did the same to me, I was sent a message
| asking my opinion on a tech topic. I spent 30min
| researching/reading to make sure my reply was accurate and
| then found out the question was generated by a LLM, and he
| just wanted to show off how good a LLM was.
|
| It will color every interaction you have with that
| person...
| GaggiX wrote:
| If it was vomit, it will be recognized quickly, AI or
| not, not an hour of listening for sure; yes, even if it
| was sent by a friend.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I think you are leaving the human out of the loop. When a
| friend of mine recommends me something I'll lower my
| skepticism because I'm assuming my friend would not send
| me garbage.
|
| If a random podcaster says "I've proved that P=NP" I'd
| say "no you didn't", but if a math professor sends me
| that same link I'll keep listening to see where this
| goes. And I've definitely read texts making wild
| assertions that only at the end were revealed as hit
| pieces and/or propaganda.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Even if you think your friend would only send good
| things, you would realize that something is vomit in less
| than an hour. I cannot understand someone listening to
| something for an entire hour and then whining that they
| waste their entire hour and it was vomit, you're not in a
| cinema, you didn't pay a ticket for it, you listen to
| something because you like it or move on.
| elpocko wrote:
| You can argue your point all day, it will not resolve
| their cognitive dissonance. No matter how convincing,
| high-quality or entertaining it was, no matter for how
| long they happily consumed the content: it's AI-
| generated, they hate AI, therefore it's vomit, period.
| drw85 wrote:
| Maybe they thought their friend wanted feedback, or
| something in return.
|
| In that case i would listen to all of it aswell,
| otherwise i can't give honest feedback.
| Vanit wrote:
| I read some of your other replies and I can't quite get a
| read on your line of reasoning.
|
| The issue is we would give less attention to these things
| if it wasn't for the social credit the humans gave the
| vomit. So we engage in good faith and it turns out it was
| effectively a prank, and we have no choice but to value
| requests from those people less now because it was clear
| they didn't care about our response.
| GaggiX wrote:
| No one listens to an hour of actual vomit just because a
| friend sent it to them, you should value your time more
| if you do at minimum.
| unraveller wrote:
| You ever watched a reviewbrah video? he doesn't get to
| "without any further ado" moment until after the halfway
| point of the video. The prank is the wasted time. But the
| joke is every other YTber does it more subversively
| without you getting any laughs out of it. It proves we
| give way more attention to slop then we dare to
| calculate.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@TheReportOfTheWeek
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| Probably spent an hour waiting for it to get to the good
| part. Haha!
| squigz wrote:
| I asked a friend if they had any ideas about something, and
| they asked an LLM, and it's like... If I wanted an LLMs
| answer, I'd ask it myself. I want your answer, distilled
| through your experience and opinions...
| ColinEberhardt wrote:
| I don't think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast
| is pretty shallow - lots of 'whoa meta' and the word 'like'
| thrown into every sentence.
|
| Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but
| not one with any real depth.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| 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?
| JonathanFly wrote:
| Bark can sound as good, but Google is using SoundStorm which
| was specifically trained on dialogs. Surprisingly Bark can
| even sort of match it without being trained to do so, but not
| reliably.
| (https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386)
|
| And SoundStorm has more than twice the context window of Bark
| so dialogs are a tight fit.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I just tried the default bark.cpp example from the github
| readme, and to me it still doesn't sound close enough to
| realistic, and the audio quality itself was a bit
| scratchy... maybe I'm doing something wrong.
|
| When I tried my own text with it, it went completely off
| the rails... skipping completely over random words, and
| also switching to different voices in the middle of a
| sentence. Trying to run the large model also crashed
| entirely.
| JonathanFly wrote:
| You aren't doing anything wrong - Bark out the box uses a
| randomly generated voice and I like to think it's
| modeling the world of random voices which includes bad
| microphones/audio-quality. (Even bad 'actors' - see how
| many Bark voices sound like they are reading a script.)
|
| Presumably it was trained in noisy data. But it can
| generate and use a clean voice, they are in there. Most
| of the Suno default voices are not great either - but a
| great voice can sound perfectly clear. I haven't done
| much with Bark lately but on my Twitter there's plenty of
| clear examples of very realistic voices. Actually here I
| ran a prompt based on some copy and pasted test 20 times
| in Bark. I put a couple better results up front, but even
| in later samples you can find lots of evidence of human-
| sounding voices. https://sndup.net/bzhz5/
|
| Going off the rails and hallucinating is a hard problem.
| It can be minimized, but probably would have to solved
| with simple brute force (check the output with S2T and
| retry if needed.)
|
| For raw audio you can replace the final decoding step
| with something like VOCOS or MBD if you want to maximize
| audio quality, though you don't need do with the best
| voices.
| GaggiX wrote:
| It already feels more nuanced than the usual podcast.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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
| macawfish wrote:
| This is awesome, thanks for sharing
| infogulch wrote:
| 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Summarizing Wikipedia pages has been gotten down to a
| science, both for podcasts and YouTube explainer videos. This
| just makes it easier!
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Agreed... and no offense to OP but I am now questioning just
| how in touch with modern society they really are.
|
| Would they also observe a rocket launch from the grounds of
| the space center and go "eh, not really impressive" ?
|
| Or maybe they are just defining "impressive" as something
| totally different to what we're thinking.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Probably acquainted with <<modern society>> and a bit edgy
| in the nerves about it.
|
| Probably calling "impressive" something which adds value
| and does not suggest eerie bits.
|
| Sam Altman: <<They laughed at us... Well they are not
| laughing now, are they>>. No, but a different kind of
| "serious" was raised.
| djur wrote:
| Kind of feels like looking at an overflowing landfill and
| thinking "I wonder if we can invent a robot that just
| generates new trash directly into the landfill".
| squigz wrote:
| This holier than thou attitude that crops up in these
| threads is so annoying, as if people wanting to casually
| enjoy a mediocre podcast or radio show on the 1 hour
| commute to their shitty job is a crime.
| klabb3 wrote:
| I don't think anyone cares about other people's cheap
| pleasures. What people do care about is the displacement
| of quality and craft. For instance, you could say the
| same thing about the state of the web - say when
| searching for recipes. Maybe some people like the ads,
| the consent forms, the backstories? Why so purist? Isn't
| it nice with a bit of scrolling and getting in the mood
| for cooking with a bit of SEO?
|
| Defending craftsmen and attention to detail is not just
| about purism or gatekeeping. I appreciate _people who
| care_ , even in fields I don't personally care about
| (yet?). The professor who annoyingly insists on making
| sure every student "really gets it", or the woodworker
| who is adamant about what joints are superior, or the
| kernel hacker who maintains rigor in face of hundreds of
| feature requests. The integrity of professionals can make
| or break institutions.
|
| With AI reducing the effort to create garbage to the
| point of commoditization, people have a right, and
| arguably even an obligation, to be concerned. Remember,
| tech doesn't follow potential, it follows incentive.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| not a crime, more like an act of self harm
| squigz wrote:
| You and GP are so cool and enlightened. Please teach me
| your ways o wise ones.
| abraxas wrote:
| 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.
| shreezus wrote:
| 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!
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| It's incredible how high our expectations have become which
| really is a testament to the rapid development of AI.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| 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" cliche, a ridiculous vestige of the era of
| Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. It is a bit sad that we become
| blase so quickly.
|
| > There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once
| some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to
| consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking".
| The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next
| thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was
| first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's
| Theorem: "Al is whatever hasn't been done yet."
|
| This quote is from the 80s, from GEB by Douglas Hofstadter.
|
| (and btw, I just took a grainy, poorly-lit picture from the
| book, and could automagically select the text from it, since
| I couldn't find the quote online. Imagine that tech in the
| 80s. Hell, it was bad even in the 2000s, with OCR being hit
| and miss for a long time. Now it "just works".)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| Imagine showing this and your comment to someone 5 years ago.
| surfingdino wrote:
| 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.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Would be easy to take ad filled podcast transcript and re
| generate it without the ads
| vessenes wrote:
| To me, that's just how they tuned the 'audience' of the
| podcast, which I think we can imagine was at least partly
| informed by the 'audience' IRL podcasts are named at. I, too
| would like to be able to 'turn up the technical' on these, but
| for example, I dumped a paper about a latchless mutexless work
| distribution algorithm into it, which I had read but still had
| questions about, and the podcast accurately summarized,
| simplified it, and got my questions answered, which I then
| validated later by re-reading the paper. It was faster than
| combing through the paper would have been.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Related discussion _NotebookLM is quite powerful and worth
| playing with_ (54 points, 11 hours ago, 21 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688804
| keiferski wrote:
| This is impressive from a technical point of view and probably
| useful from an educational one; I really like the idea that a
| piece of text can be transformed into any kind of media format
| easily, depending on your preferences. As recently as a year ago
| I was using Apple's text to speech tool to listen to Wikipedia
| articles while biking, and needless to say, they weren't very
| exciting to listen to.
|
| 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.
|
| Which leads me to hope that the next versions of Notebook will
| allow more customization of the speakers' voices, tone, education
| level, etc.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It would be ideal if they made the SoundStorm model available
| via API.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > 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.
| Merik wrote:
| 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 for me.
| swyx wrote:
| 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.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| I think something like a Socratic dialog option would be useful
| as well.
| crabmusket wrote:
| 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.)
| modeless wrote:
| AI content emulates the "production values" of high quality
| content, but it doesn't actually have the quality of the content
| it's emulating. This is why it seems impressive at first and can
| even fool people for quite a while. It fools our brains'
| heuristics for detecting good content. But when you examine it
| closely, the illusion falls apart. NotebookLM is not different
| than other generative AI products in this respect.
|
| I do think that this will change in the not too distant future.
| OpenAI's o1 is a step in the direction we need to go. It will
| take a lot more test-time compute to produce content that has
| high quality to match its high production values.
| JonathanFly wrote:
| Lawncareguy85, the creator of the viral "Podcasters discover they
| are AI" podcast has some other fun creations in this thread:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1fs7ka3/noteboo...
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| I really, really hope they keep investing into NotebookLM and
| expand its ability to source more types of files, including
| codebases, complex websites etc. Feels really powerful for
| anybody studying or consulting many different clusters of
| learning materials at once.
| zerop wrote:
| People have tried it on codebases,
| https://x.com/rseroter/status/1836519803802259732
| whyenot wrote:
| This is amazing. I uploaded the instruction manual for a
| Scholander pressure chamber (a piece of equipment for measuring
| plant moisture stress) and made a podcast from it. The
| information in the podcast was accurate, it included some light
| banter and jokes, while still getting across the important topics
| in the instructions. I don't know what I would use a podcast like
| this for, but the fact that something like this can be created
| without human intervention in just a few minutes is jaw dropping,
| and maybe also just a teeny bit scary.
| bbor wrote:
| 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
| andrepd wrote:
| This isn't "quite expert-level in terms of symbolic
| reasoning" in the same way as a soapbox isn't "quite a
| formula 1"
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| The symbolic reasoning is flawed but okay - the problem
| comes about because 99% of human reasoning is not symbolic.
| bbor wrote:
| We accidentally invented general models that can coherently
| muse about the philosophical beliefs of Gilles Deleuze at
| length, and accurately, based on two full books that they
| summarized. You can be cynical until your dying day, that's
| your right -- but I highly recommend letting that fact be a
| little bit impressive, someday. There's no way you live
| through any event that's more historically significant,
| other than perhaps an apocalypse or two.
|
| In other words: soapbox is presumably some sort of toy car
| that goes 15mph, and formula 1 goes up above 150mph at
| least (as you can tell, I'm not a car guy). If you have any
| actual scientific argument as to why a model that can score
| 90-100 on a typical IQ test has only 1/10th the symbolic
| reasoning skills of a human, I'd love to eat my words!
| Maybe on some special highly iterative, deliberation-based
| task?
| cainxinth wrote:
| > 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.
| ddmma wrote:
| NotebookLM on everyone lips, so these are llm powered notebooks
| ?!
| wenbin wrote:
| Do people actually enjoy this type of AI-generated "podcasts" vs
| human-produced shows?
|
| As a podcast listener, I lose interest if I can tell the audio is
| AI-generated...
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| 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.
| kombookcha wrote:
| > 3-5 years ago, I guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell
| it's AI generated
|
| You would however be able to tell that it was extremely
| obnoxious and bland, and without the novelty of the technical
| trick, you would not be listening to it.
| Kiro wrote:
| Not true. I gave it a few documents and webpages of things
| I'm interested in and it was surprisingly engaging.
| kombookcha wrote:
| I strongly doubt that you're gonna be listening to this
| stuff recreationally once the novelty wears off, but if
| I'm wrong and you actually enjoy listening to two robots
| pretend to be excited about your documents and webpages
| long term, then have fun with that I guess.
| abraxas wrote:
| would you know it's AI if you didn't know going into it?
| emsixteen wrote:
| > 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.
| Quothling wrote:
| 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.
| thih9 wrote:
| I think that's the point - it's increasingly more difficult to
| tell whether the content or parts of it are AI generated.
| timoth3y wrote:
| 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, but the
| author doesn't really have anything to say. Publishing a book is
| not about communicating ideas, but a means to something else.
| It's not meant to stand on its own.
|
| The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable
| to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.
| peutetre wrote:
| But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts
| that are synthetic affectations of no substance?
| jcims wrote:
| I've probably bought ten books in the last five years that
| I've never read.
|
| I've heard at least one ad from dozens (probably a hundred)
| podcast episodes that I didn't finish.
| timoth3y wrote:
| In the case of those books and podcasts, who cares if you
| read or listen to them? The point is that the books are sold
| and make the right lists. The point is that the podcasts are
| downloaded so ads can be sold or that vanity numbers can be
| reported.
|
| In terms of such music and films (whether created by human or
| AI) sometimes it's just because we are social creatures and
| need shared experiences to talk with others about.
| peutetre wrote:
| But knowing it's synthetic, why would you buy the book or
| listen to the podcast in the first place? There's nothing
| social or shared in a synthetic affectation.
| corysama wrote:
| In an ideal world, I would sit down with an espresso or a
| beer, and review collections of research papers on a
| regular basis.
|
| In reality, between work, sleep and family, I rarely have
| anything resembling that kind of time and mental energy
| reserve available.
|
| But, what I can afford is to listen to podcasts while
| doing other things. Doing that gives me enough of an
| overview to keep up with a general topic and find new
| topics that might be worth investing into deeper.
|
| Wouldn't it be great if someone made a podcast channel
| specifically for "Papers corysama wants to hear about at
| this moment"? I think so. Apparently, so do a lot of
| other people. But, they don't want to list to my specific
| channel.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I wouldn't read an AI-generated book (except maybe once as a
| curiosity), but I would definitely listen to AI-generated
| music if it were good enough.
|
| Reading a book is a time investment so I want it to convey
| the thoughts of another human being, otherwise it would feel
| like wasting my time. Listening to music, on the other hand,
| often is something that I do while I exercise, to keep a
| brisk pace and not get bored. As long as it sounds good, fits
| the genres and styles I like and is upbeat enough for
| exercising, I wouldn't have much of a problem with AI music -
| maybe it would even be a plus, since there are some specific
| music genres where I have already listened to pretty much
| everything there is (and no more is being made), and it would
| be great to have more.
|
| I don't listen to podcasts, but I suppose in that case it
| depends on how you do so: devoting your full time and
| attention like a book, or as a background while you do
| something else like exercise music? As far as I know, many
| listeners are in the latter case, so I don't see why they
| wouldn't listen to AI podcasts.
| djur wrote:
| There's background sounds and there's music. Music can
| communicate as much as the written word. I've listened to
| algorithmically generated bloop-blops and it's fine for
| background sound, but if it can't touch my heart it's not
| really music to me.
| lugu wrote:
| To me, as soon as I know it was fully generated it looses
| it's magic. It doesn't matter how good it is.
|
| I see the same with potteries. A factory made pot cannot
| have more value than a hand made pot with the signature
| of a human. This touches the very fabric of society. Hard
| to explain.
| MrScruff wrote:
| I think it comes down to your area of interest. As a
| musician and music lover, I spend a significant amount of
| time trying to find or create music that is both original
| and good. AI generated music can be a competent imitation
| of well established ideas and forms, but that's of zero
| value to me - I'm not looking for 'more of the same' -
| quite the opposite.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Of course. In my case, I'm not saying that I could do
| with AI music in any context either. Sometimes I play
| music in the living room, and I pay real attention to it,
| obviously AI won't do there. But when I'm using the music
| just as a background for exercising? Then sure, why not.
| grugagag wrote:
| So you're basically saying filler music, elevator music,
| backgrouound noise or whatever names it may come under.
| Since there's already so much of it out there and since
| AI one isn't novel in any way, I have a hard time
| understanding why you'd choose AI generated one.
| llmfan wrote:
| LLMs are already better than books for exploring some
| ideas. But in conversation form.
|
| Until we get better versions of o1 that can generate
| insights over days and then communicate them in book form
| the loss of interactivity and personalisation makes LLM
| books pointless.
| devb wrote:
| > I would definitely listen to AI-generated music if it
| were good enough
|
| Why not just seek out the original works that the AI stole
| from?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Because that's not how it works.
| devb wrote:
| Yes it is. How else are they "trained?"
| JonathanFly wrote:
| >But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts
| that are synthetic affectations of no substance?
|
| A randomly selected NotebookLM podcast is probably not
| substantial enough on its own. But with human curation, a
| carefully prompted and cherry-picked NotebookLM podcast could
| be pretty good.
|
| Or without curation, I would use this on a long drive where
| audio was the only option to get a quick survey of a bunch of
| material.
| llmthrow102 wrote:
| That's the same question I have. There is already a ton of
| great podcasts/music/everything in the niches that I like
| that I don't have the time to listen to them all. I also like
| to have quiet introspective time.
|
| So where does AI regurgitated slop fit into my life?
| dromtrund wrote:
| In the case of NotebookLM, the AI generated podcasts aren't
| competing with existing podcasts, they're competing with
| other ways of consuming the source material. Would I rather
| listen to a real podcast? Yes. But no one's making a real
| podcast about the Bluetooth L2CAP specification.
| LegitShady wrote:
| All podcasts compete for peopled time and attention.
| richardw wrote:
| 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/
| lynx23 wrote:
| Seriously, hardcore history? I dont even remember where I
| heard from him, but I think it was a Lex podcast. So I
| checked out hardcore history and was mightily disappointed.
| To my ears, he is rambling 3 hours about a topic, more or
| less unstructured and very long-winded, so that I basically
| remember nothing after having finished the podcast. I tried
| several times again, because I _wanted_ it to be good. But
| no, not the format for me, and not a presentation I can
| actually absorb.
| emsixteen wrote:
| Don't worry, you're not alone. I can't remember what I
| didn't like about it, but I really wasn't a fan.
|
| Thankfully there's plenty out there I am a fan of!
| phreeza wrote:
| Yea there are much better examples of quality history
| podcasts, that are non-rambling. E.g. Mike Duncan podcasts
| (Revolutions, History of Rome), or the Age of Napoleon
| podcast. But even those are really just very good
| digestions of various source materials, which seems like
| something where LLMs will eventually reach quite a good
| level.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| For such historical topics, my LLM-based software
| podgenai does a pretty good job imho. It is easier for it
| since it's all internal knowledge that it already knows
| about.
| triceratops wrote:
| It's interesting I have the exact opposite opinion. I'm
| sure Mike Duncan works very hard, and does a ton of
| research, and his skill is beyond anything I can do. But
| his podcasts ultimately sound like a list of bullet
| points being read off a Google Doc. There's no color,
| personality, or feeling. I might as well have a screen
| reader narrate a Wikipedia article to me. I can barely
| remember anything I heard by him.
|
| Carlin on the other hand, despite the digressions and
| rambling, manages to keep you engaged and really _feel_
| the events.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Hardcore History can certainly be off kilter, and the first
| eppy of any series tends to be a slog as he finds his
| groove. That said, Wrath of the Khans, Fall of the
| Republic, and the WW1 series do blossom into being
| incredible gripping series.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Try "fall of civilizations." Best pod I know. Maybe
| Shwep.net
| krzyk wrote:
| Interesting stuff, but the music and the well, falls are
| quite depressing.
| refurb wrote:
| Yes! I'm a huge history buff (read hundreds of books) and
| was so excited when someone told me about Hardcore History.
|
| I tried a few episodes. I really tried. I couldn't do it.
| It reminded me of my uncle would tell a 5 min story in half
| an hour.
|
| The dramatic filler, breathless story telling was too much
| for me. If anything it would put me to sleep.
|
| I've found a few history podcasts that I think go into a
| lot more depth and I learn a lot more from.
| speckx wrote:
| I, too, found hardcore history a bit unstructured. If you
| like history, take a look at
| https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/.
| sqeaky wrote:
| 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 podcast. But if you need expert Insight
| because expert Insight is your product and you happen to
| deliver it through a podcast then you need an expert.
|
| If I were a small software shop and I wanted something like a
| weekly update describing this week's updates for my customers
| and I have a dozen developers and none of us are particularly
| vocally charismatic putting a weekly update generated from
| commits, completed tickets, and developer notes might be
| useful. The audience would be very targeted and the podcast
| wouldn't be my main product, but there's no way I'd be able
| to afford expert level podcasters for such a position.
|
| I would argue Perun is a world class defense Logistics expert
| or at least expert enough, passionate enough, and charismatic
| enough to present as such. Just like the guys who do
| Knowledge Fight, are world class experts on debunking Alex
| Jones, and Jack Rhysider is an expert and Fanboy of computer
| security so Darknet Diaries excels, and so on...
|
| These aren't for making products, they can't compete with the
| experts in the attention economy. But they can fill gaps and
| if you need audio delivery of something about your product
| this might be really good.
|
| Edit - but as you said the robots will catch up, I just don't
| know if they'll catch up with this batch of algorithms or if
| it'll be the next round.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| > 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 society, we need a lot
| of people who will never be anything but mediocre still
| going for it, so we can end up with a few who do manage to
| reach excellence. If AI causes people to just give up even
| trying and just hit generate on a podcast or image
| generator, than that is going to be a big problem in the
| long run. Or not, and we just end up being stuck in world
| that is even more mediocre than it is now.
| squigz wrote:
| > as a society, we need a lot of people who will never be
| anything but mediocre still going for it, so we can end
| up with a few who do manage to reach excellence
|
| Do we though? That seems bleak.
| eszed wrote:
| " _Reach_ excellence " is the key phrase there.
| Excellence takes time and work, and most everyone who
| gets there is mediocre for a while first.
|
| I guess if AIs become excellent at _everything_ , and the
| gains are shared, and the human race is liberated into a
| post-scarcity future of gay space communism, then it's
| fine. But that's not where it's looked like we're heading
| so far, though - at least in creative fields. I'd include
| - perhaps not quite yet, but it's close - development in
| that category. How many on this board started out writing
| mid-level CRUD apps for a mid-level living? If that path
| is closed to future devs, how does anyone level up?
| squigz wrote:
| > But that's not where it's looked like we're heading so
| far
|
| I think one of the major reasons this is the case is
| because people think it's just not possible; that the way
| we've done things is the only possible way we can
| continue to do things. I hope that changes, because I do
| believe AI will continue to improve and displace jobs.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| There are... many people who think that cities are worse
| off because of cars. Maybe not for the same reasons, but
| still.
| cglan wrote:
| cars have made us much less fit though...
| sqeaky wrote:
| 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.
| sqeaky wrote:
| 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.
| theptip wrote:
| This is true but the quality frontier is not a single bar.
| For mainstream content the bar is high. For super-niche
| content, I wouldn't be surprised if NotebookLM already
| competes with the existing pods.
|
| This will be the dynamic of generated art as it improves; the
| ease of use will benefit creators at the fringe.
|
| I bet we see a successful Harry Potter fanfic fully generated
| before we see a AAA Avengers movie or similar. (Also,
| extrapolating, RIP copyright.)
| llm_trw wrote:
| On the contrary, the mainstream eats any slop you put
| infront of it as long as it follows the correct form - one
| needs only look at cable news - the super niche content is
| that which requires deep thinking and novel insights.
|
| Or to put another way, I've heard much better ideas on a
| podcast made by undergrad CS students than on Lex Fridman.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Cable news viewership has been rapidly dwindling.
| oxym0ron wrote:
| I would say the opposite is true - mainstream cares much
| less about the quality content but more about catchy
| headline.
| solumunus wrote:
| It's the complete opposite. Unless your definition of
| mainstream includes stuff like this deep drive into
| Russia/Ukraine, in which case I think you're
| misunderstanding "mainstream".
| authorfly wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks...
|
| We all seek different kinds of quality; I don't find Peruns
| videos to have any quality except volume. He reads bullet
| points he has prepared, and makes predictable dad jokes in
| monotone, re-uses and reruns the same points, icons, slides,
| etc. Just personally, I find it really samey and some of the
| reporting has been delayed so much it's entirely detached
| from the ground by the time he releases. It's a format that
| allows converting dense information and theory to hour long
| videos, without examples or intrigue.
|
| Personally, I prefer watching analysis/sitrep updates with
| the geolocations/clips from the front/strategic analysis
| which uses more of a presentation (e.g. using icons well and
| sparingly). Going through several clips from the front and
| reasoning about offensives, reasons, and locations is seems
| equally difficult to replicate as Peruns videos, which rely
| on information density.
|
| I do however love Hardcore history - he adds emotion and
| intrigue!
|
| I agree with your overall hope for quality and different
| approaches still remaining stand out from AI generated
| alternatives.
| richardw wrote:
| I like a range of the Ukraine coverage. From stuff that
| comes in fast to the weekly roundup-with-analysis. E.g.
| Suchomimus has his own humour and angle on things, but if
| you don't have a unique sense of humour or delivery then
| it's easier for an AI to replace you.
|
| Give it a year or three, up to the minute AI generated
| sitrep pulling in related media clips and adding
| commentary...not that hard to imagine.
| grugagag wrote:
| > Give it a year or three, up to the minute AI generated
| sitrep pulling in related media clips and adding
| commentary...not that hard to imagine.
|
| But why? Isn't there enough content generated by humans?
| As a tool of research AI is great in helping people do
| whatever they do but having that automated away
| generating content by itself is next to trash in my book,
| pure waste. Just like unsolicited pamphlets thrown at
| your door you pick up in the morning to throw in the bin.
| Pure waste.
| caulk wrote:
| Drifting off topic, but do you have any examples of those
| analysis/sitrep content creators you prefer?
| lasc4r wrote:
| Not who you asked, but the daily ones I sometimes watch
| are Reporting From Ukraine and Denys Davydov.
| richardw wrote:
| Not your parent commenter but I like:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/@militaryandhistory
|
| https://m.youtube.com/@suchomimus9921
|
| https://m.youtube.com/@WardCarroll
|
| Fav is probably Suchomimus right now. Updated faster,
| shorter reports. I feel like I get the info sooner after
| it happens.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/@anderspuck
| authorfly wrote:
| All of the other commentators have replied with a good
| diverse set of YouTubers and included ones with biases
| from both sides; I'd recommend the ones they have linked.
| Some (take note of the ones that release information
| quicker) might be more biased or more prone to reporting
| murky information than others.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| I think the main problem with Peruns' videos are that they
| are videos. I run a little program on my home-lab that
| turns them into podcasts and I find that I enjoy them far
| more because I need to be less engaged with a podcast to
| still find them enjoyable. (Also, I gave up on being up to
| date with Ukraine situation, since up to date information
| is almost always wrong. I am happy to be a week or a 14
| days behind if the information I am getting is less wrong).
|
| I like Hardcore history very much, but I think it would be
| far worse in a video form.
| Torkel wrote:
| Just turn off the screen with youtube video playing and
| there's no difference from a podcast?
|
| I listen to Perun at the gym every week, audio only.
| lasc4r wrote:
| That's a paid service that some people balk at.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > That's a paid service that some people balk at.
|
| AFAIK, it's only a paid feature to play video in the
| background.
| maest wrote:
| PipePipe on Android does it for free. (Or New pipe or
| some other *Pipe players)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It doesn't have to be paid, YouTube on the mobile browser
| can do it for free.
| posterboy wrote:
| on firefox
| bogtog wrote:
| Perun is peak podcast-like YouTube. In the gym, I just
| keep my screen on to share my YouTube tastes with the
| world and sometimes peak at some visuals
| richardw wrote:
| I'd also like a podcast. I usually walk around with the
| video in my pocket to be honest. Audio is 80% of the
| value in his case.
| graemep wrote:
| > He reads bullet points he has prepared, and makes
| predictable dad jokes in monotone, re-uses and reruns the
| same points, icons, slides, etc.
|
| The presentation is a matter of taste (I like it better
| than you do), but the content is very informative and
| insightful.
|
| Its not really about what is happening at the frontline
| right now. Its not its aim. Its for people who want dense
| information and analysis. The state of the Ukrainian and
| Russian economies (subjects of recent Perun videos) does
| not change daily or weekly.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Pleased to see Perun being mentioned on HN.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| It's always funny when I find out that various people I
| respect follow Perun uploads closely.
| OJFord wrote:
| I would like them to be _right_ , for that to mean that the
| 'real' content gets fewer (fewer bother) but _better_ (or at
| least higher SNR among what there is).
|
| And then faster/easier/cheaper access to the LM 'uninspired
| but possibly useful' content, whatever that might look like.
| fny wrote:
| Try Lawfare as a better LLM hurdle. The depth and expertise
| and at times physical experience required for their
| discussions seems far out of reach.
|
| I suspect LLMs are not sophisticated enough as a paradigm to
| get there.
| DanHulton wrote:
| 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
| discussion about how it doesn't actually live up to the hype,
| that it achieves a solid "mid" and stops there, I think this
| means it's more likely that the robots AREN'T going to get
| there some day. (Well, not unless there's another
| breakthrough AI technique.)
|
| Either way, I still think it's interesting that there's this
| article of faith a lot of us have "we're not there now, but
| we'll get there soon" that we don't really address, and it
| really colors the discussion a certain way.
| atrus wrote:
| AI has been so conflated with LLMs as of late that I'm not
| surprised that it feels like we won't get there. But think
| of it this way, with all of the resources pouring into AI
| right now (the bulk going towards LLMs though), the people
| doing non-LLM research, while still getting scraps, have a
| lot more scraps to work with! Even better, they can
| probably work in peace, since LLMs are the ones under the
| spotlight right now haha
| llamaLord wrote:
| 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.
| collinmanderson wrote:
| 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.
| beefnugs wrote:
| 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.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I'm not sure. The bestsellers lists are full of average-
| or-slightly-above-average wordsmiths with a good idea,
| the time and stamina to write a novel and risk it
| failing, someone who was willing to take a chance on
| them, and a bit of luck. The majority of human creative
| output is _not_ exceptional.
|
| A decent LLM can just keep going. Time and stamina are
| effectively unlimited, and an LLM can just keep rolling
| its 100 dice until they all come up sixes.
|
| Or an author can just input their ideas and have an LLM
| do the boring bit of actually putting the words on the
| paper.
| llamaLord wrote:
| I get your point, but using the best-sellers list as a
| proving point isn't exactly a slam-dunk.
|
| What's that saying? "Nobody ever went broke
| overestimating the poor taste of the average person"
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I'm just saying, the vast majority of human creative
| endeavours are not exceptional. The bar for AI is not
| Tolkien or Dickens, it's Grisham and Clancy.
| Terr_ wrote:
| IMO the problem facing us is not that computers will
| directly outperform people on the quality of what they
| produce, but that they will be used to generate an
| enormous quantity of inferior crap that is just good
| enough that filtering it out is impossible.
|
| Not replacement, but ecosystem collapse.
| richardw wrote:
| LLM's are not the last incarnation. I assume that all the
| money, research and human ingenuity will eventually find
| better architectures.
|
| I'm not sure we really want that, but I am pretty sure
| we'll try for it.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed. I think people are extrapolating with a linearity
| bias. I find it far more plausible that the rate of
| improvement is not constant, but instead a function of the
| remaining gap between humans and AI, which means that
| diminishing returns are right around the corner.
|
| There's still much to be done re: reorganizing how we
| behave such that we can reap the benefits of such a
| competent helper, but I don't think we'll be handing the
| reigns over any time soon.
| jimbokun wrote:
| People are taking it as an article of faith because almost
| every prediction that "AI will not be able to do X anytime
| soon" has failed.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| In addition to "will the robots get there?" there's also
| the question "at what cost?". The faith-basedness of it is
| almost fractal:
|
| - "Given this thing I saw a computer program do, clearly
| we'll have intelligent AI real soon now."
|
| - "If we generate sufficiently smart AI then clearly all
| the jobs will go away because the AI will just do them all
| for us"
|
| - "We'll clearly be able to do the AI thing using a
| reasonable amount of electricity"
|
| None of these ideas are "clear", and they're all based on
| some "futurist faith" crap. Let's say Microsoft does
| succeed (likely at collosal cost in compute) in creating
| some humanlike AI. How will they put it to work? What
| incentives could you offer such a creature? What will it
| want in exchange for labor? What will it enjoy? What will
| it dislike? But we're not there yet, first show me the
| intelligent AI then we can discuss the rest.
|
| What's really disturbing about this is hype is precisely
| that this technology is so computationally intensive. So of
| course the computer people are going to hype it--they're
| pick and shovel salespeople supplying (yet another) gold
| rush.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I stumbled on a parody of Dan Carlin recently. I don't know
| the original content enough to know if it's accurate or even
| funny as a satire of him specifically, but I enjoyed the
| surreal aspect. I'm guessing some AI was involved in making
| it:
|
| An American Quakening
|
| https://youtu.be/wGpdxsgreOE?si=r7ef1vBOjIvqD_PQ
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| You'll like this: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-
| age-of-average
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| You're right, I love this, thanks! I was familiar with some
| of these examples, e.g. Komar and Melamid's painting
| example (and, IIRC, unless I'm confusing with other
| artists, they also painted a painting filled with features
| that the "average" person hated, like abstract geometric
| shapes and stark colors, and the artists actually liked
| that painting and said something along the lines of "turns
| out we're really good at making bad art"), and the "AirBnB-
| style of interior design" was so excellently skewered by
| SNL recently, and HN has had a number of posts about how so
| many brands have devolved to the same monochrome, san-serif
| typefaces for their logos.
|
| Still, at the same time, I couldn't help but feeling a
| little bit sad/resigned at the existence of the article you
| linked. Here I thought I had an idea that was not exactly
| unique but that I felt would be good to share. And yet then
| here is an example that expresses this idea a million times
| better than I ever could (I love "The Age of Average"
| headline), with great researched examples and tons of
| helpful visuals. It's hard to not feel a bit like Butters
| in that "Simpsons did it!" episode of South Park...
| ezst wrote:
| What you say (though I'm not sure that we can speak of an
| "ideal"), compounded with the "late stage capitalism" fact
| that everything today is consolidated, and has to be about
| making profit and maximizing it: Disney shareholders probably
| like the latest Marvel movie more than you do for being the
| same as the previous ones: business don't like taking risks.
| The same applies to your furniture maker: when you sell to
| millions and want your shelves stuffed, you pick a select few
| materials and color variations that minimize cost and targets
| the broadest audience.
| 3abiton wrote:
| 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.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Same here. In fact, I typically struggle communicating my
| scientific research to journalists, and next time I'll use
| this. It found some good metaphors to make even a quite math-
| heavy paper's core concepts understandable to the audience
| without losing correctness, which is something that both I
| and the journalist typically fail to do (I keep the
| correctness but don't make it understandable enough, so then
| journalists start coming up with metaphors and do the
| opposite).
|
| A lawyer friend of mine also suggested giving it the Spanish
| civil code, a long, arid legal text. The podcast of course
| didn't cover the whole text in 10 minutes, which would be
| impossible, but they selected some interesting tidbits and
| actually had me hooked until the end and made me learn a few
| things about it, which is no small merit. And my friend was
| quite impressed and didn't complain about correctness.
| tkgally wrote:
| 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 article or
| research paper, I run it through NotebookLM and listen to the
| podcast while I'm exercising.
|
| My only complaint is that the chatty podcasty gab gets tiring
| after a while. I wish it were possible to dial that down.
| jp_nc wrote:
| 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.
| airspresso wrote:
| that's value add right there. Summarizing text into audio
| saves time.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| 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.
| deng wrote:
| 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).
| jeremyjh wrote:
| That's actually a really good application of AI, because the
| quality of the content is meaningless as long as it hits the
| bullet points. They only do this to check a box that training
| on <topic> was done.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Right? The fact that the LLM output is indistinguishable from
| a podcast says more about podcasts than about LLMs.
|
| If anything, listening to that reminded me of why I stopped
| listening to podcasts in the first place - every 5 second
| snippet of something interesting ends up suffocated by 5
| minutes of filler and dead air.
| emsign wrote:
| 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.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's a really good analogy.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| And yet Clint Eastwood by the Gorillaz was a Casio demo
| track.
|
| It isn't so black and white.
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/Wn0NtSNeQEQ
| lugu wrote:
| That is to the point. Gorillaz has talent, and that is what
| made Clint Eastwood a hit. Not the Yamaha.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| Similarly, Under Mi Sleng Teng[1], but here too it required
| human musical talent.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleng_Teng
| jazzypants wrote:
| To be clear, Dan the Automator added an additional drum
| track, an additional bass track, and a melodica track as
| well as numerous other sound effects. They didn't just loop
| the Casio demo track.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| agentultra wrote:
| ... 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| This is just a "no true Scotsman" take.
|
| Popular music has already been synthetic and souless for
| decades now. People will listen to what sounds good to
| them, and we already know the bar is very low, and that
| the hard truth is that it is all subjective anyway.
| jazzypants wrote:
| Sure, bars and restaurants will have an endless supply of
| boring music, but no one is ever going to go to an AI
| music event.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Read it and weep:
|
| https://www.nydailynews.com/2016/05/29/thousands-of-new-
| york...
| agentultra wrote:
| More of a behavioural science take. Is music the sound
| that is played or the people making the sound?
|
| We've had software accompaniment for a long time.
| Elevator music. The same 4 chords arranged in similar
| ways for decades. Hasn't destroyed music. Neither will
| AI.
|
| At some point people are going to want to know who's on
| the other side making the music.
|
| Unless your argument is that nobody values artists...
| which is I guess one of the primary conceits of GenAI
| enthusiasts today.
| tarsinge wrote:
| 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.
| IanCal wrote:
| > the quality of the content is largely irrelevant.
|
| But the content here has been fed into it deliberately.
| janoc wrote:
| 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.
| huijzer wrote:
| > 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).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I think that has always been the case, we just tend to
| compare today's average stuff with the best stuff from
| earlier days.
|
| I agree with this of course, because generally nobody
| remembers the bad stuff unless it was the _worst_. I beg to
| differ with music, though, because there 's an opposing
| effect: we tend to be left with the most _marketed_ music,
| which was usually a cheap knockoff of something interesting
| going on at the time. The shitty commercial knockoff becomes
| the "classic" while the people they were ripping off don't
| even get a wikipedia page.
| malignblade wrote:
| You're raising a good point about how "best" is defined.
|
| If you ask most people, they are by definition more likely
| to connect with broadly disseminated cheap knock offs than
| they are with whatever 'legit' inventive underground
| creator, simply because they've heard the former and not
| the latter.
|
| Just a mental exercise: If you ask 1000 people if they
| prefer Knock Off or Original, and 900 say Knock Off, which
| one was better? If the answer is still Original, by what
| metric do we measure quality?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > 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.
| belter wrote:
| The same could be said of most technical blogs, they are just
| marketing content to sell a company service...Miss the old
| Internet...
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| 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..
| LegitShady wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| 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.
| dustingetz wrote:
| 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).
| alickz wrote:
| 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
| grugagag wrote:
| Id say most people skip the reading part and watch the movie
| instead.
| lvl155 wrote:
| 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.
| fhe wrote:
| my first job out of college was at a big name management
| consulting firm... to riff on your point: yes, such is the
| entire career for many. and theirs aren't even such bad
| careers if one only considers money and prestige. two years
| there completely cured me of any illusion of positive
| correlation between prestige and intelligence. I used to
| wonder if the partners at the firm actually believed the
| bullshit they were spilling -- actually "delivering value"
| per consulting parlance. I get it that people do
| intellectually dishonest things just for the money... but the
| partners seemed to genuinely believe their chatgpt-esque text
| generation. In the end I figured it was a combination of
| self-selection (only the true believers stay for the years
| and make partner) and a psycho-hack where if you want to
| convince your client, you better believe it yourself first
| (only the true believers make good evangelists).
| oddthink wrote:
| 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?"
| skapadia wrote:
| 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Already in the sample embedded by Simon. "Gosh", "wow",
| "like", "like", "like", "[wooooaaaawiiiing,
| woooooooaawiiiiiiing]", "Oh my god", "I was so, like...".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDdqq_9TzI&t=34s [April
| Ludgate meets Tynnifer, Parks and Rec]
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > the interesting thing is that most people don't really care
|
| no one has gotten feedback from "most people" .. this is raw
| hyperbole
| chefandy wrote:
| > 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.
| Qworg wrote:
| I'm confused about your point RE: infomercials et al - that's
| poor quality "content" that's been proliferating for, as you
| say, more than 50 years.
|
| Is that not the work of commercial creative workers? Did it
| not exist pre AI? There's an argument to scale, certainly,
| but the idea that "things were better in the past before
| these <<new technologies>> came out" is generally a suspect
| argument.
|
| To your broader point - new tools for creating creative work
| come out all the time. Did we suffer greatly at the loss of
| image compositors when Photoshop arrived? On the flip side,
| did digital art gut painting and sculpture? Isn't this just
| another tool for creative expression?
|
| Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating. I don't think
| the technology is taking that away.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Have you never in your life enjoyed a pirated movie, game,
| book or music track?
| chefandy wrote:
| 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."
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > There's also a canyon of a difference between that...
| effectively putting the artists out of business.
|
| There is a direct line between music piracy you did in
| the past and the status quo of Spotify paying
| millidollars to artists today. Another POV is, find me
| musicians who prefer a world with Internet piracy
| compared to one without.
| quest88 wrote:
| > 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 pay premiums for art to support the artist and their
| work.
|
| As someone else replied to you, it's similar to piracy. The
| people that pirate were never going to pay in the first
| place. To tie it back here, the people listening to AI
| generated <whatever> were never going to pay in the first
| place - which is why so many podcasts get their money from
| ads.
| chefandy wrote:
| > 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.
| quest88 wrote:
| I haven't seen that idea (artists being morally
| bankrupt), like you I'd strongly disagree. I also agree
| it's a shitty situation that artists invested hundreds of
| hours of their own time to create something only to be
| repackaged and sold by some AI tool.
|
| That said, I'd still make the same point that people who
| value art and the artist will buy from and support the
| artist. Those that don't value it, won't. But now we're
| on a larger scale.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >That said, I'd still make the same point that people who
| value art and the artist will buy from and support the
| artist.
|
| The chances anyone will come across the artist when their
| marketplace is flooded with increasingly plausible
| simulacra become more and more slim as time goes on.
|
| AI is choking off any hope for artists supported by
| patronage, simply by virtue of discoverability being lost
| and trust being eroded.
|
| >But now we're on a larger scale.
|
| It's simply a bad problem, made worse!
| cm11 wrote:
| > The people that pirate were never going to pay in the
| first place.
|
| I think I agree with your larger point, but is this part
| true? When Spotify provided a much simpler UX to get the
| goods, people were happy to pay $10/month and Napster et al
| basically died.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The technology industry seems to be overflowing with so-
| called "rational" people who mainly seem to use use whatever
| intelligence they have to rationalize away responsibility for
| whatever problems their beloved technology has caused. It's a
| really stupid and obnoxious pattern; and once you see it,
| it's hard to not see if everywhere and be annoyed.
|
| I think one element of it is naked greed (especially from the
| entrepreneurs) but I think another big part is a kind of
| stuntedness and parochialism that's often fueled by
| overconfidence (because of success in software engineering,
| forming an identify around "being smart" etc).
| chefandy wrote:
| 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.
| caeril wrote:
| > > the people getting ripped off
|
| Nobody is getting "ripped off" by ML models any more than
| by other humans. When a human wants to launch a high-
| quality podcast, they survey the market, listen to a lot of
| other high quality podcasts, and then set to creating their
| own derivative work.
|
| What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just
| much, much faster.
|
| Everything humans create is derivative of other works.
| Speed is the only difference.
| FeloniousHam wrote:
| 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".
| lordnacho wrote:
| > 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.
| gaieges wrote:
| 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.
| hu3 wrote:
| This is better than I expected.
|
| I sent the podcast audio to friend, and English is not their
| first language. Without telling them it was AI generated.
|
| They found it entertaining-worthy enough to listen to the end.
|
| Sure it needs more human unpredictably and some added goofiness.
| Maybe some interruptions because humans do that too. But it's
| already not-bad.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| It's hard for me to believe that this isn't two real people
| talking. The only complaint I have is that they say "like" a
| little too often.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| OK, this is pretty amazing, but is there a "Valley Girl" setting
| in NotebookLM somewhere? In the sample given in this article,
| both of the "podcasters" had to add a "like", like every 5
| seconds. I couldn't take it:
|
| > this tech is just like leaps and bounds of where it was
| yesterday like we're watching it go from just spitting out words
| to like...
| JimDabell wrote:
| That's one of the disfluencies the article mentions.
| niemandhier wrote:
| 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.
| JonathanFly wrote:
| "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.
| freedomben wrote:
| I would seriously pay, even a subscription fee, to have that
| ability downloaded into my brain. The first few mentions of
| "like" don't typically get me, but the more it's used the
| irritation level grows exponentially...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Strongly suspect it's age-related. I noticed the comment
| you responded to stated 'along with lower key words like
| "right" or "uh uh"'.
|
| The turn of phrase "low-key" became popular in the 2010s -
| I barely, if ever, heard it used before then - so my guess
| is that this user is in their twenties to early thirties.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Instead of teaching AI to write so poorly we should be teaching
| people to write and speak properly.
| felipeerias wrote:
| Personally, I would love to try this for learning languages.
|
| Some people absorb information far easier when they hear it as
| part of a conversation. Perhaps it would be possible to use this
| technique to break down study materials into simple 10-minute
| chunks that discuss a chapter or a concept at a time.
| rjh29 wrote:
| 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.
| GaggiX wrote:
| 3-4 hours a day for a year is not even realistic, unless it's
| a language that already has a lot in common with yours, like
| Italian and Spanish.
| felipeerias wrote:
| I am already doing that. What I meant is that there are
| specific topics, grammar, vocabulary, etc. that I would
| probably remember better if I also got them in the form of a
| conversation between two knowledgeable people.
| amanzi wrote:
| Anyone else thinking that the male voice sounds suspiciously
| similar to Dax Shepard? I generated one of these podcasts last
| week and that was the first thing I noticed. I haven't seen any
| reporting on it.
| richardw wrote:
| I was building out something along these lines and the voice was
| just rubbish (I mean, sounded fine for one short episode but
| won't on the 20th episode) at the time, so postponed to focus on
| more near-term goals. But the variation in voices here is quite a
| bit better, and will improve. You know this is going to be a
| thing.
|
| There are still some extremely challenging/interesting problems
| to make it not terrible. This is where we get to invent the
| future.
| vochsel wrote:
| They've really nailed the back and fourth of the two speakers!
|
| It would be interesting to know if it's multimodal voice, or just
| clever prompting and recombining...
|
| I added single voice podcasts to Magpai after seeing how useful
| this was. Allows for a bit more customisation of the podcast too
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEsh9MlbA6s
|
| I've got a daily podcast of hackernews being generated here too:
| https://www.magpai.app/share/n7R91q
| JonathanFly wrote:
| It's almost certainly Google SoundStorm, a traditional TTS
| trained on dialogs from last year:
| https://x.com/jonathanfly/status/1675987073893904386
| userbinator wrote:
| There are already tons of similar AI-generated content on
| YouTube. It's only a matter of time before stuff like this
| becomes the equivalent of the omnipresent SEO spam today.
| JonathanFly wrote:
| 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.
| nickhodge wrote:
| what fresh hell are we creating?
| jldugger wrote:
| 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.
| nestorD wrote:
| My first instinct was to not see why one would want to consume
| such a podcast, a simile instead of either the original or an
| (AI?) summary of the original. Then I remembered a partially
| disabled friend who regularly asks for audio books, because he
| physically cannot read long form. This, condensed, output would
| make a lot of ideas accessible to him.
| kozikow wrote:
| Ah, I see someone who doesn't commute by car
| stevage wrote:
| Jesus it's good. I gave it some of my travel blogs, and wow. I
| mean, there are flaws, particularly in the shallowness of the
| analysis, but it's at least as good as some time-poor podcast
| hosts would do.
| ionwake wrote:
| 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 ?
| Animats wrote:
| Coming soon, "Late Night With Google AI"?
| agland411 wrote:
| I supposed that also applies to blogs, especially to those
| featuring a relentless positivity.
| slhck wrote:
| Gave it a bunch of technical papers and standards, and while it's
| making up stuff that just isn't true, this is to be expected from
| the underlying system. This can be fixed, e.g., with another
| internal round of fact-checking or manual annotations.
|
| What really stands out, I think, is how it could allow
| researchers who have troubles communicating publicly to find new
| ways to express themselves. I listened to the podcast about a
| topic I've been researching (and publishing/speaking about) for
| more than 10 years, and it still gave me some new talking points
| or illustrative examples that'd be really helpful in
| conversations with people unfamiliar with the research.
|
| And while that could probably also be done in a purely text-based
| manner with all of the SOTA LLMs, it's much more engaging to
| listen to it embedded within a conversation.
| theptip wrote:
| 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.
| juliushuijnk wrote:
| I fed it some info about my UX mobile app. Some parts are very
| cringe, extremely positive, but in the end it went on to
| brainstorm a potential 'next step' feature that was quite
| creative; letting end-users test-out prototypes during the wire-
| framing process. Also some more marketing-like text like "It's
| like drawing on napkin, but the napkin in your phone". I like
| that.
|
| So as a brainstorming tool, it's a nice low-effort way to get
| some new perspectives. Compared to the chat, where you have to
| keep feeding it new questions, this just 'explores' the topic and
| goes on for 10 minutes.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Reminds me of Futurama news stories. Actually, what if NotebookLM
| could be customized to generate podcasts voiced by Morbo the
| Annihilator and his co-host Linda van Schoonhoven?
|
| Still, I don't hold much confidence on podcasts as knowledge
| transfer tools. It's a nice gimmick with great voice synthesis,
| but it feels formulaic and a bit stilted from a knowledge
| navigation perspective.
| stuaxo wrote:
| I like how he says not robotic sounding podcasts but then does
| sound a bit like a robot.
|
| I didn't listen further in to see if it was a robot or just that
| he was American (I may later though).
| emsign wrote:
| Who wants to listen to this? Is there seriously a market for non-
| human hosts?
| mrdevlar wrote:
| Like... probably... like not.
| _ink_ wrote:
| 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.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| Haha The example audio sounds like the guys from manager tools
| https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/the-single-most-effect...
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| > which is it generates an outline, it kind of revises that
| outline, it generates a detailed version of the script and then
| it has a kind of critique phase and then it modifies it based on
| the critique
|
| I'm seeing this to be true in almost every application.
|
| Chain of thought is not the best way to improve LLM outputs.
|
| Manual divide and conquer with an outlining or planning step, is
| better. Then in separate responses address each plan step in
| turn.
|
| I'm yet to experiment with revision or critique steps, what kind
| of prompts have people tried in those parts?
| famahar wrote:
| I uploaded my detailed game design document for a project I've
| been working on in my free time and it was kind of a weird
| confidence boost. The two hosts seem to treat ideas like their
| the most insightful relevatory information they've ever heard.
| After a few uploads of other documents you start to notice the
| same overly surprised tone.
| djur wrote:
| 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.
| firtoz wrote:
| Reminds me of my father who'd tell every kid that they're a
| genius, including myself. It got me motivated to try things,
| but whenever there was a failure, I felt terribly betrayed.
| scotty79 wrote:
| General advice from psychology is that when it comes to
| success you should praise the kids for things they control,
| like effort, time spent, inquisitiveness, concentration not
| things that are out of their control like talent or luck.
| Basically praise for what they did, not what they are.
|
| When it comes to morality, it's the other way around. You
| praise kids for being good people when they do something
| right. Because you want them to internalize identity of a
| good person and associate it with those behaviors.
|
| Internalizing identity of a genius is mostly useless,
| rarely beneficial, often harmful.
| bityard wrote:
| That sucks. But it's why I keep trying to remind my kinds
| that even though they are smart, they will fail at things.
| Failing is a part of learning. Possibly even the most
| important part. "If you're not making mistakes, you're not
| trying hard enough."
| kombookcha wrote:
| Honestly, it's obviously horrendously gag-worthy and
| everything, but also kind of funny that there is so much
| bullshit marketing copy out there that LLM's invariably
| converge on this inspirational Stanford application letter /
| upbeat linkedin influencer tone of voice, and just apply it
| to everything.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| Well, an LLM doesn't have the capability to like anything
| more than anything else. It doesn't really matter to GPT if
| your diary excerpt is the worst piece of writing ever
| written, or the most brilliant - it'll just tell you what you
| want to hear and that's that.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Only because they've been RLHFed and prompted to be
| agreeable. A Marvin the Paranoid Android LLM could
| similarly be designed to hate everything equally.
|
| Genuine People Personalities, indeed.
| Kiro wrote:
| How is it sickening? Tell it to roast you if you think it's a
| problem.
| Sammi wrote:
| Sickening in the same way you get sick from eating too much
| sugar.
| corobo wrote:
| Must have been prompted to be an American podcaster.
|
| Bring on the one that's all British and snarky!
| klabb3 wrote:
| Might be hard to spot if you're American in the US, but LLMs
| feel very American even outside of region and language.
| Concretely, I have to constantly ask for recipes to be
| changed to metric. Less concretely, the undertones and
| mannerisms of politeness, positivity and "excitedness" comes
| across as very American to me, probably even within the rest
| of the Anglosphere. How would I describe it? Maybe similar to
| how you'd feel about a mix of Ned Flanders, Ted Lasso and
| some Valley girl stereotype - im sure it's a bit off putting
| also for many Americans.
|
| I guess it's training data but also heavily RLHF. I doubt
| that the trainers are aware of their own cultural biases and
| values, and they may not care. And why should they? In either
| case, from a thousand yard perspective, it's probably an
| effective vector for spreading "American values", if you
| will.
| corobo wrote:
| Oh absolutely. Early on into the AI craze I tried to use it
| to summarise my messages[1] and it made them overly fluffy
| and weird.
|
| Anyone receiving the message would instantly clock that I
| didn't write it - even with a prompt longer than the
| original message trying to massage out all of the
| Americanisms and false enthusiasm. Not a use case that
| works for me, haha.
|
| [1]: I was trying to use it to shorten my "If I had more
| time, I would have written a shorter letter" waffling.
| bityard wrote:
| I guess there might be some culture nuance here.
|
| I can't speak to all of the LLMs, but as an American who
| listens to a LOT of podcasts, I can tell you why these ones
| sound the way they do: the audience. People who listen to
| (non-fiction) podcast want to be informed. They are people
| who are curious about the world around them and are
| generally interested in self-improvement at some level. Can
| you imagine a personal finance or health podcast delivered
| in a pessimistic or even fatalist tone? No, they are all
| _optimistic_ (even energetic) in tone, because that's the
| WHOLE reason people are listening to them at all.
|
| I don't think the folks at Google are as patriotic as you
| think they are.
| vessenes wrote:
| As an American, I find it exhausting. I think of it as fake
| Silicon Valley/SF "nice" affect combined with non-US
| English as a second language floridity. My setup prompt for
| ChatGPT includes a reminder that if it answers too long or
| slowly, then it will take time away from my medical
| research grad students and people will probably die as a
| result of the delays. It helps a little.
| cainxinth wrote:
| 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.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| I was suprised at how effective the positivity was on me when I
| fed it one of my design docs! Color me impressed at the
| naturalness of the resulting "conversation".
| riffraff wrote:
| am I the only one surprised by by how much the example sounds so
| much like the "Money Stuff" Podcast? E.g. the male host going low
| with his voice and the female host using a more informal speech
| pattern. I wonder if it's just a perception thing.
| untoasted12 wrote:
| I think it's just a common format for podcasts. Sounds exactly
| like 'No Stupid Questions' to me.
| gexla wrote:
| Getting complex jokes right would be impressive for me. I don't
| have much of a sense of aesthetic for music and most art. A
| painting looks good, but I don't understand how I'm supposed to
| appreciate. Half my music could be AI generated, and I wouldn't
| notice if it's background music. An AI generated wine would taste
| the same to me as a $1000 bottle. But I think most people
| understand comic genius. Chapelle's jokes are far better than
| someone who is on stage to deliver a performance with predictable
| material. You could probably apply this to all other art as well.
| A rap artist will recognize the genius of one artist vs another
| one who is cranking out junk. As with writing. As with music. I
| think we're still in that stage where we're impressed the AI can
| do anything at all.
| VMG wrote:
| > 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
| gexla wrote:
| You're right. Chappelle is controversial, and many rightfully
| abhor his material. However, I think you can look at the
| structure of his jokes objectively rather than the content.
| Obviously, you can't say all his material is like this. But
| the well paying shows are brilliant IMO. I appreciate his
| creativity compared to many other comics. Comedy is hard.
| That's why I said good comedy from bots is where I would
| really be impressed.
| michaelteter wrote:
| I tried it with my resume, and the results surprised me. My
| observations:
|
| - They do some interesting communication chicanery where one host
| asks a question to me (the resume owner); I'm not there, so
| obviously I can't answer. But then immediately the co-host adds
| some commentary which sort of answers while also appearing to be
| a natural commentary. The result is that the listener forgets
| that Michael never answered the question which was directly asked
| to him. This felt like some voodoo to me.
|
| - Some of the commentary was insightful and provided a pretty
| nice marketing summary of ideas I tried to convey in my terse (US
| style) resume.
|
| - Some of the comments were so marketing-ey that I wanted to gag.
| But at the same time, I recognize that my setpoint on these
| issues is far toward the less-bs side, and that some-bs actually
| does appeal to a lot of people and that I could probably play the
| game a little stronger in that regard.
|
| Overall I was quite impressed.
|
| Then for fun I gave it a Dutch immigration letter, one which said
| little more than "yeah you can stay, and we'll coordinate the
| document exchange". They turned that into a 7 minute podcast. I
| only listened to the first 30 seconds, so I can only imagine how
| they filled the rest. The opener was funny though: "Have you ever
| thought of just chucking it all and moving to a distant land?"
| ... lol. Not so far off the mark, but still quite funny to come
| up with purely from an administrative document.
| amunozo wrote:
| 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.
| iNic wrote:
| It's impressive, but it also feels like "slop". It somehow
| manages to make whatever content you give it feel more hollow.
| You can tell it doesn't "think" about the content. I am scared
| that this will be shoved in my face everywhere.
| kypro wrote:
| I've been seeing loads of these pop up on YouTube at the moment.
| Granted, it's probably because I'm clicking on them and YouTube
| is serving me more, but it does seem that some people (non-
| technical folk or kids) might not realise they are AI generated
| and who knows, perhaps soon one of these podcasts will actually
| be rather popular.
|
| Personally I think the flow of the conversation is lacking a bit
| right now. To me it still sounds like two people reading off a
| script trying to sound like podcast hosts. I guess that's because
| I'm picking up on some subtle tonalities that sound off and
| incongruent. Still impressive though.
|
| I think a great use case for it would be education. It would make
| learning textbook content far more engaging for some children and
| also could be listened to on the bus or in the car on the way to
| school!
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've always found podcasts like this boring and uninspiring. In
| fact, I'm starting to see a pattern: the less I like something,
| the more likely it can be done well with AI. But I know I'm the
| minority as so many seem to be ok with filling their lives with
| "content".
| yard2010 wrote:
| Why are they saying "like" so much in the example?
| fefe23 wrote:
| Ladies and Gentlemen, let the race (to the bottom) begin!
|
| While the vultures will shit out AI generated garbage in volume
| to make ever diminishing returns while externalizing hosting cost
| to Youtube and co, actual creators will starve because nobody
| will see their content among the AI generated shit tsunami.
|
| Finally the AI bros are finishing the enshittification job their
| surveillance advertising comrades couldn't. Destroy ALL the
| internet! Burn all human culture! Force feed blipverts to
| children for all I care, as long as I make bank!
|
| I guess it's easiest to destroy culture if you didn't have any to
| begin with.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I don't need the TTS part, but love how they create the text as a
| dialog between two non-expert humans. Any idea what a prompt for
| that would look like?
| palmfacehn wrote:
| Podcasts and chat are interesting, but the real potential in this
| would be to synthesize new documents from the inputs. Apply the
| information gleaned from the study materials to a user scenario
| and output a new work of fiction.
| xcke wrote:
| I just created the example podcast about the Bitcoin Whitepaper
| in NotebookLM:
|
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/9cf789be-1052-404b-8d...
|
| And after, generated notes from the podcast:
|
| https://podscribe.io/content/podcasts/101/episode/1727685408...
|
| The podcast was exciting, however not really went to too much
| details.
| afiodorov wrote:
| Reminds me of GTA3 radio - can we retrofit this somehow? I miss
| driving around mindlessly and now we can get actual quality
| podcasts too.
|
| I wonder which successful game will make use of AI generated
| content next.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I liked their example; it's so meta
| derduff wrote:
| It is perfect to transform a complex article to a sort of
| socratic conversation, which helps to digest the topic much
| easier. Very helpful and fascinating.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I just gave it straight up erotica from an old Usenet post. The
| results are hilarious.
|
| I also tried the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy. It was actually
| well done.
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/1d13e76e-eb4b-48ef-89...
|
| Also just uploading msdos 1.25 asm
| https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v1.25/source
|
| It was way better than I though
|
| I think the best is the self referential. This actual comment
| thread:
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/4a67cf10-dd3b-42b3-b5...
| valleyer wrote:
| 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| So like, a regular podcast then?
|
| I tried feeding it the voynich manuscript but it's just
| erroring out
|
| Make sure you check the last link in my first post. It's the
| nightmares of Philip K Dick
| CaptainFever wrote:
| I was surprised that NotebookLM not only allows erotica (for
| now), the AI hosts approached the topic appropriately and
| didn't shy away from it, while remaining professional.
| kristopolous wrote:
| They should continue to let people be absurd. We really need
| to get over freaking out about sex as a society. We're all
| adults here.
|
| It's not like it'll bleed over into other documents and our
| AI hosts will start acting out a slash fiction story in the
| middle of summarizing a quarterly report.
| agomez314 wrote:
| I can't help but think how much this will continue the
| 'enshittification' of the internet. The problem with this tech is
| that people will release these 'podcasts' and drown out all the
| human-made content that most people want to listen to. It's not
| that this tech is bad in itself or that it doesn't have uses,
| it's that _we have no social feedback mechanism for getting
| people to stop producing this kind of content!_
| christkv wrote:
| The combo of this, AI generated images and AI generated garbage
| articles and blog posts will completely destroy the internet.
| This will be fun to watch. What happens after is going to be
| interesting.
|
| What happens when all our search tools are completely unreliable
| because it's all generated crap?
|
| I'm already telling my kids they can trust nothing on the
| internet.
|
| How much of HN now is AI bots?
| yreg wrote:
| The male voice really reminds me of CGP Grey.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Ok, so, this is my impression from shoving philosophy texts into
| it.
|
| For things that already have a large body of scholarship, and
| have a set of fairly solidified interpretations, it is very good
| at giving summaries. But for works that still remain enigmatic
| and difficult to interpret, it fails to produce anything new or
| interesting.
|
| It seems to be a more complex version of ChatGPT, but it has the
| same underlying problems, so its not useful for someone doing
| academic work or trying to create something radically new, as
| with other LLMs in the past.
| mrits wrote:
| 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.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I'm just saying that, just like other models, it appears at
| first to have a great deal of use value but in actuality it
| only works for small edge cases and on things that you can
| find easily yourself without the model.
| lynx23 wrote:
| It has always been hard to find _quality entertainment_ if you
| have some standards... I am sure some countries have actual
| quality folk music. My country doesn 't And whenever I switch on
| (by accident) a _local_ radio station I end up cringing. I
| submit, those people that consume such content already, will not
| notice when AI takes over. They haven 't noticed in the past, and
| they will not notice in the future, that they are fed crap 24/7.
| spikey_sanju wrote:
| I just scraped this HN comments & blog post, fed them to
| NotebookLLM, and BAM! This podcast was born. Mind blown.
|
| https://x.com/spikeysanju/status/1840708506749399479
| yapyap wrote:
| Not too excited for this from a practical view but technically
| it's pretty impressive
| abdellah123 wrote:
| This is mind blowing !!
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| I actually find this alternative Google pdf-to-podcast service
| much better -- it is less sensationalist and goes into more
| technical depth:
|
| https://illuminate.google.com/home?pli=1
|
| Currently only handles arxiv PDFs.
| vessenes wrote:
| I didn't know about this, thanks! I just tried one; to my ears
| it is _much_ less engaging vocally. I like the extra detail
| though. I 'd probably personally prefer to tune NotebookLM's
| technicality of audience if I could. I'd also like different
| speakers - I wouldn't be surprised if we all will recognize the
| NotebookLM speakers instantly in a year or so.
| Lockal wrote:
| Here is a list of adverb/adjectives from that page:
| "surprisingly, astonishingly, deep dive (s/delve/dive/),
| effectively, honestly, actually, realistically, finally". What is
| actually happening: endless yapping. Both in podcasts and this
| article. - "Hold up. What if I say that sky is
| not blue?" - "Whoa, I did not even think about it. "
| - "Wait, so if the sky isn't blue, what color is it then?"
| - "Maybe... it's invisible? Like, we can see through it, so
| technically it's not there!" - "Exactly. This idea is
| revolutionary, right?" - "Bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
| bla"
|
| I failed to listen through the whole example audio attached,
| because, you know, it is mostly, like, throwing, like, arbitrary,
| like, questions - and confirm, you know, with words
| "exactly/see/yeah/you got it/you know it/yeahaha/pretty much,
| right/that's a million dollar question", you know. It's a
| brainrot conversation I would never listen to.
| gapeslape wrote:
| I bet the comment above was produced by generative AI.
| kolinko wrote:
| The podcast about the comments in this thread :)
|
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7973d9a3-87a1-4d88-98...
| kristopolous wrote:
| I did that as well:
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/4a67cf10-dd3b-42b3-b5...
|
| It's wild how different it is.
| leetrout wrote:
| 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.
| trancilo wrote:
| This is very fun to listen to. Listening to the "hosts"
| commenting on the technology that created "them".
| vessenes wrote:
| They start out with "whoa, very meta." Hilarious.
| hmottestad wrote:
| 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".
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Note that this was at the 1min mark.
| martijnarts wrote:
| "and with over four hundred comments" not quite! Currently 295
| comments.
| mistermann wrote:
| A prompt including a long list of specific flaws to look for
| would make it even more interesting.
| olavgg wrote:
| This is really awesome, I just added my startup website as a
| source, which is a mess of data engineering content written a
| little bit by myself and mostly by chatgpt 3.5 one year ago. What
| I find really impressive, it reads the big SVG I have on the
| landing page, and create a story about a real world use-case
| scenario.
|
| The result:
| https://intellistream.ai/static/intellistream_podcast2.ogg
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Now make one that produces an actually effective professional
| lecture audiobook rather than an unprofessional podcast.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Let's say the use case is that you want to get a light,
| conversational summary of some dense, technical articles while
| you're out for a walk. Even if you thought this service was
| awesome on day one, if you used this every day for a month, would
| you hate it by the end or not? It's neat, but I can imagine it
| becoming repetitive quickly, and the seams starting to show after
| the initial impression wears off.
| firebot wrote:
| Its.. like ... Like... Whatever... Like... Uh....
|
| This is awful.
| efitz wrote:
| What are humans for, then?
| joacod wrote:
| With NotebookLM, I created a podcast using articles I write on
| DEV.to as input. It's an experiment, but the generated audio
| result surprised me.
|
| "Code Quests" is available on Spotify
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/7fyQhgEk8u54e7u0cRPQR3?si=1...
|
| In this episode, NotebookLM AI talks about how AI tools like
| NotebookLM are revolutionizing content creation.
|
| I know it's a little meta...
|
| Link to the article used as input for this episode
| https://dev.to/joacod/from-articles-to-podcast-powered-by-ai...
| weberer wrote:
| If you get a "Service unavailable" message when trying it out, it
| means you are region locked because you're in the EU. Clear your
| cookies and use an American VPN to access it. Its very annoying,
| but at least the workaround isn't too much of a headache. Yet.
| dannyw wrote:
| Don't worry, the EU regulators will probably "fix" that
| workaround soon.
| grvdrm wrote:
| I wrote a blog/newsletter/post/whatever about my experience.
| Absolutely experienced the wow factor as well.
|
| What was more interesting was the word-for-word accuracy.
|
| I fed all of my posts year-to-date into NotebookLM and had it
| generate the podcast. The affect/structure was awesome.
|
| But I noticed some inaccuracies in the words. They completed
| botched the theme of at least one of my posts and quite literally
| misinformed in a few other spots. Without context, someone new to
| my posts and listening to the podcast would have no idea.
|
| So, absolutely - wow factor. But still need content validation on
| top. Don't think any of you are surprised but felt it was worth
| emphasizing.
|
| https://theteardown.substack.com/p/ai-expressing-empathy-fre...
| vid wrote:
| Podcasts can be a kind of social experience that's akin to
| morning talk show hosts, the actual content can be quite low. A
| real potential of this is the combination of the podcaster's
| intent and the listener's context. Between the two, podcasts can
| be generated personalized to each individual listener, while
| still keeping it a more passive medium and the podcasters can
| retain their personality in the synthetic form. This has really
| huge potential for those moments where you want to learn, want
| some personality and bias, but don't want 3/4 of the podcast to
| be for a general audience. It's an interesting hybrid of broad
| and narrowcasting. I think by the time it's in the wild, it won't
| really be a podcast though, because direct q&a will be an option
| (albeit with the usual drawbacks of LLMs).
| tkgally wrote:
| Inspired by this discussion, I had NotebookLM make three podcasts
| based on very minimal input: a one-line proverb, pi to 15 digits,
| and a short list of the most common words in English ("the of and
| to a in for is on that ..."). Here are the results:
|
| https://www.gally.net/temp/20240930notebooklmpodcasts/index....
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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...
| mistermann wrote:
| The language one is quite insightful!
| sodality2 wrote:
| I decided to turn my philosophy class's readings into 'podcasts'
| to introduce and summarize the topics before fully sitting down
| and skimming for information I missed. It's been hugely helpful -
| sitting down and reading a 30 page PDF can be
| daunting/inconvenient, so having a lighter introduction in a more
| palatable audio format (during workouts, commutes, etc) is
| amazing. I even uploaded it to Spotify to share with classmates.
| anonu wrote:
| The audio output from NotebookLM is amazing - but I've heard
| probably a dozen audio outputs from it over the last week. At
| first listen the cadence, intonations, etc... are absolutely
| incredible. But then format quickly gets tedious as it all
| follows the same pattern.
|
| In separate news: I've been looking into building a web publisher
| plugin that allows you to "save articles" and then generate a
| podcast for later listening. With summarization and more
| advancements in text-to-speech, this is getting easier to hack
| together something really compelling.
| replete wrote:
| Is there a `like_temperature` that could be, like, adjusted??
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not normally one to require features in order to use, but
| this one is an absolute must for me.
| jimijazz wrote:
| 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?
| handelaar wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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?
| rafram wrote:
| > 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.
| mronetwo wrote:
| 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.
| sodality2 wrote:
| And if that means the best way to learn now is podcasts,
| what do you prefer: not learning, or learning via a way you
| view as inferior?
| the8thbit wrote:
| I don't doubt you're right about social media and
| smartphones rotting our attention spans. But also,
| peripatetic philosophy is ancient. I spend most of my day
| sitting. Whether its work, entertainment, or hobbies, most
| of these things have me sat in front of a screen. So its
| nice, and I do think it increases my retention, to be able
| to do something while walking or cycling instead of
| sitting.
| rafram wrote:
| It's unlikely that some people prefer to learn by listening
| to discussions?
| mronetwo wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| Well... I mean... you're wrong.
| cjaackie wrote:
| so that's the cool part, I think, instead of wasting time
| on socmed and news cycle composting, waste time on this
| instead. I think this is the general direction all media is
| headed, regardless of whether one agrees with it or not.
| Feed it whatever you want and it will shuffle together a
| plot, just for you.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Assuming you are one of them, I'm curious about one thing
| (honest question, not meant to disrespect): does it not
| bother you at all to _know_ that those voices do not belong
| to any human being? When I listen to a semi-adolescent girl's
| voice explaining something with a lot of "like"s and an
| informal tone, the fact that I know this was AI-generated
| makes me feel disgusted in my stomach (I am serious, this is
| not supposed to sound edgy or anything). I feel like my mind
| is trying to actively imagine the human being behind that
| voice, at the same time that it knows there's none at all.
| Like I'm being cheated?
| the8thbit wrote:
| Not the person you're responding to, but no, it doesn't
| really bother me at all. What does bother me is that I
| don't have confidence in the value of the output, where as
| if I listen to This American Life, or a podcast or
| audiobook from a trusted authority, I don't have to worry
| about that.
| rafram wrote:
| I'm not - I think I learn better by reading. But I know a
| lot of people who _do_ prefer discussions, and I thought
| that the comment I replied to came off as arrogant and
| dismissive of the idea that anyone else might learn
| differently.
|
| I've listened to a few NotebookLM samples but haven't used
| it myself, so I can't really speak to how creepy it is in
| practice. Probably pretty creepy! (I don't think that the
| female voice in the samples sounds "semi-adolescent,"
| though, for what it's worth - both of the voices just sound
| like millennial podcasters to me.)
| orangecat wrote:
| Fascinating. I don't have that reaction at all, but if it's
| common it could account for some of the variation in
| people's perceptions of AI.
| sodality2 wrote:
| 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Since when industrial snacks are healthy food?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Conversational audio form is really not an "industrial
| snack". If I had the chance to listen to podcasts about any
| topic, I would do so much more often - uploading PDFs of
| academic papers, manpages, etc.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Yes, but should not you wait for the generated content -
| the text - to be at proper level? We have "Francis
| Fukuyama vs John Grey" available...
|
| If the purpose is serious, of information access
| management, why did they elect the form of a pisstake
| ("like")?
| sodality2 wrote:
| I personally appreciate the lighter
| introduction/discussion into a topic. That may be all
| it's good for, and that's okay. I'm not replacing my
| reading with this any time soon, precisely because of the
| problems you mention.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| This probably isn't really a good analogy. It's just a fact
| that for most people, a conversation is more engaging than
| an academic paper. It's easier to pay attention to it, and
| it's easier to retain the information in it.
|
| This might be healthy food that tastes like a snack.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _a conversation is more engaging than an academic
| paper_
|
| I certainly agree with you, but it has to be _quality_
| conversation.
|
| The example provided could suggest "think at what we
| could achieve" in an outcome that shows "and that is what
| could possibly go wrong".
| ben_w wrote:
| Indeed. But MREs, protein shakes, Huel etc. are also a
| product of industrialisation.
|
| In this case, I could see potential value for a better
| iteration of this tech, making it a meal replacement shake
| rather than a candy bar.
|
| There's too much interesting content for me to read it all,
| and I have a long commute. Right now I'm using that commute
| to learn German, and that is a good use of that time, but
| let's say I didn't need to because I hadn't moved country
| or I was already fluent: in this hypothetical, I'd gladly
| have a better AI than this(!) generate podcasts about the
| articles that I don't have time to read.
|
| But the AI would need to be better than this one for that
| to be worthwhile -- I just popped one of my own blog posts
| into it, and it was kinda OK-ish, but did make some stuff
| up. Now sure, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect was written with
| humans in mind, but that's a shared disappointment and not
| a reason to let this AI off that particular hook.
| 1-6 wrote:
| When I last checked, even healthy foodies occasionally
| enjoy shelf-stable snacks.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| So let us say you could have effortful (as opposed to
| buttery-bread "no need to chew"), nutrient, and
| appetizing: if the snack is effortless (but for the bad
| spice) but with a hint of possibly no nutrients (when not
| possibly unhealthy), and tastes the-bad-way weird
| ("...like, OMG - I hmmmm was, like..."), where is the
| appetizing part?
|
| If the "conversational form" (very good idea per se) has
| an implementation which would flow easily if not for the
| disturbing speech quirks, with doubts about the content
| quality: where can the interest be?
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| ... insane catastrophizing." Nice unique phrase. Guessing
| you're not a LLM. ;^)
|
| The thing that is being offered is of no interested to me, as
| are almost any AI generated content. I'm a human, and am
| interested in what humans do and say and think. AI content
| offends my sensibilities at every level. I dismiss it without
| even thinking twice. So all those people who do podcast,
| music, art, whatever, with AI, well, you lost me folks. I pay
| a lot of money for the things I like. AI ain't getting any of
| it, not out of spite (can't spite an AI, they're not human!)
| but on principle.
| sodality2 wrote:
| That's fine. To say you don't like something is fine. To
| say something holds no value is a stronger claim.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| 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 other humans - which is part of
| which makes us human and gives us social growth.
| sodality2 wrote:
| 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?
| EGreg wrote:
| Here is what AI can do thus far:
|
| 1) humans produced a lot of content in good faith on the
| internet
|
| 2) the AI was trained on it and as a result produced a
| non-von-Neumann architecture that no one really
| understands, but which can reason about many things
|
| 3) even simply remixing the intelligible and artistic
| output of millions of humans in lots of nonlinear ways,
| directed by natural language, leads to amazing
| possibilities that obviate the need for humans to train
| anymore because by the time they do, it will all be
| commoditized.
|
| 4) doing it at scale means it can be personalized (also
| create unlimited amounts of fraudulent yet believable art
| / news / claims etc.) to spam the internet with fake
| information for short-term goals, some for LULz, others
| profit or control etc.
|
| 5) targeting certain goals, like reputation destruction
| of specific people or groups, seems like low hanging
| fruit and will probably proliferate in the next couple
| years, with no way to stop it
|
| 6) astroturfing all kinds of movements, with fake
| participants, is also a pretty easy goal with huge
| incentives -- expect websites where 95% of the content
| and participants are fake trying to attract VC money or
| sell tokens, etc.
|
| 7) but ultimately, the real game changer is commoditizing
| everything you consider to be uniquely human and
| meaningful, including jokes, even eventually sex and
| intimacy. Visuals for heterosexual men, audio for
| heterosexual women (this is before the sexbots and
| emotionbots that learn everyone's micro-preferences
| better than they know themselves, and can manipulate
| people at scale into being motivated to do all kinds of
| things and gently peer-pressure those who might resist).
|
| 8) For a few years they will console themselves with
| platitudes like "the AIs arent meant to replace, but
| enhance, centaurs of human + computer are better than a
| computer alone" until human in the loop will clearly be a
| liability and people will give up... the platitudes will
| become famous as epitomizing optimistic delusions as
| humans replaced themselves
|
| Would probably be used for busy parents to rsise their
| kids at first, in a "set and and forget it" way,
| educating them etc. But eventually will be weaponized by
| corporations or whoever trains the models, to nudge
| everyone towards various things.
|
| Even without AI, the software improves all the time
| through teams of humans sending autatic updates over-the-
| air. It can replace a few things you do... gradually then
| all at once. Driving. Teaching. Entertainment. Intimacy.
| And so on.
|
| I think the most benign end-game is humans have built a
| zoo for themselves... everyone is disconnected from
| everyone by like 100 AIs, and can no longer change
| anything. The AIs are sort of herding or shepherding the
| humans into better lifestyles, and every need is
| satisfied by the AIs who know the micro-preferences of
| the humans and kids and pets etc.
|
| But it will be too tempting for the corporations to put
| backdoors to coordinate things at scale, once humans rely
| on their AIs rather than other humans, a bit like in the
| movie "Eagle Eye". But much more subtle. At that point
| most anything is possible.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| 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.
| sodality2 wrote:
| 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.
| joelanman wrote:
| a few real harms:
|
| - massively inefficient use of energy, water and other
| resources at a time we really need to address climate
| crisis
|
| - ai 'slop' with myriad mistakes and biases performing a
| mass DDOS on people trying to learn things and know
| what's true
|
| - moving resources away from actually producing factual
| and original content
| sodality2 wrote:
| Thank you, these are mostly extremely valid complaints. I
| hope with time these come to be inefficiencies that can
| be moved past (AI models turn into local-first energy
| efficient tools, becomes more intelligent at
| summarization). Right now though, wholeheartedly agree.
|
| The last one seems to be irrelevant for this specific use
| case - the content is produced, it's put into an easier
| to digest format. No one thought sparknotes would kill
| books.
| joelanman wrote:
| I was referring to real podcasts
| EGreg wrote:
| Hahaha
|
| Here we go, a claim that AI will create a glut of things
| detrimental to society
|
| And then you'll have the usual response that the things
| detrimental to society have already been there and this
| is nothing new
|
| And round and round we go, while AI advances and totally
| commoditizes all the things humans produce that you found
| meaningful.
| cdrini wrote:
| I will note this is slightly less an example of "AI
| generated" and more an example of "AI transformed". This
| takes existing, written by human documents or articles and
| transforms them into a podcast. Based on what you've
| written here, this shouldn't necessarily be in
| contradiction with your values, since you're still getting
| thoughts from other humans, and you can still pay money to
| the humans who made the original article, etc.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Turns _what_ into an easy form factor?
|
| Some of this appears to be auto-summarization + read aloud,
| but the underlying question of "is there anything here at
| all" is worth asking.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Any content you upload. PDFs, text, etc. Academic papers
| was one example I thought of (and have used).
| EGreg wrote:
| Welcome to all entertainment
|
| Why consume entertainment? It's just a time waster, right?
|
| Well that's how the news is often consumed. Through some
| sort of "morning joe" podcast
| causi wrote:
| 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.
| double051 wrote:
| 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
| yeahwhatever10 wrote:
| I don't hate the product, but God I hate appeal to authority.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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.
| RobinL wrote:
| 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.
| usaar333 wrote:
| I tried that with a paper. It emphasized the wrong points and
| 8 out of 10 minutes were just filler.
|
| I like the idea of audio based formatting, but this
| particular implementation is quite inefficient
| bbor wrote:
| Interesting! I tried it with a (famous, tbf) philosophers
| book and it did pretty well. Absolutely not optimized for
| speed, but that's on purpose. Could you share what
| field/type of paper you tried? I'm not doubting you at all
| -- I'm sure it still has many topics it fails to capture,
| mathematics probably being one of them.
| usaar333 wrote:
| https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjlr/vol25/iss3/3/
|
| Most of this is unlikely to be in training data.
|
| Doesn't even mention the basics, like ethnic demographics
| of Fiji today. Confuses history as well (what happened in
| colonial times vs post independence)
| humansareok1 wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, you nailed it.
|
| The ridiculous overuse of the word "like" is as nails on a
| chalkboard to me. It's bad enough hearing it from many people
| around me, the last thing I need is it to be part of
| "professional" broadcasting.
|
| I'm super impressed with this, but that one flaw is a
| _really_ big flaw to me.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| I really want to like it more, it could be interesting to
| drop in a textbook and get a dedicated series of podcasts
| about each chapter for example but the tone is so off-
| putting that I can't listen for more than a few minutes.
| Its pure cringe.
| simonw wrote:
| Out of interest, where do you live?
|
| I'm wondering if people's tolerance for "like" is affected
| by their geography.
|
| I live in California (from the UK originally) so I honestly
| don't even notice this any more.
| freedomben wrote:
| I live in Idaho currently, but have lived in many
| different regions in the US at various points in the past
| (though, not California). It does seem particularly
| strong in California and increasingly in western Oregon,
| western Washington, southern Nevada, and northern Utah
| (which, probably not coincidentally, have been top
| destinations for people moving out of California over the
| last 10 to 20 years).
|
| Out of curoisity, how long ago did you move to California
| from the UK? And is the "like" commonly used in the UK?
| simonw wrote:
| I moved ten years ago, so I couldn't tell you about
| "like" prevalence in the UK today - I think it was a lot
| less common than in California a decade ago.
| electrondood wrote:
| 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.
| supafastcoder wrote:
| > When I read a self-help book, but it's laced with stories,
| I lose interest. Just state the point.
|
| The reason why these books are filled with stories that
| repeat the same point over and over again is because then the
| idea will typically stick in your head. But some people have
| better imagination then others and come up with stories
| themselves when they read about a novel idea.
| GTP wrote:
| 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).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| edanm wrote:
| Yeah, don't even get me _started_ on audiobook narrators.
| Sometimes these people read entire _books_ of nonfiction that
| was written entirely by someone else.
| cdrini wrote:
| This seems like a pretty disingenuous reading of the comments
| and misunderstanding of the feature. All your points are valid,
| but I just don't thing they apply here, because the generated
| podcast is based on a human-written article. It's not asking an
| AI to create a podcast from scratch -- in which case I think
| all your points would be entirely valid. It's transforming
| existing human-created content into a different medium. There
| _are_ opinions to engage with. There _is_ expertise to learn
| from. There _is_ writing. There _are_ people. These were all in
| the source content used to create the podcast.
| jonplackett wrote:
| If we could just, like, stop it, like, saying like all the, like,
| time. That would, like, make it 100x better.
| tunnuz wrote:
| :O
| CSMastermind wrote:
| It seems to be incapable of being critical of ideas?
| 93po wrote:
| 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).
|
| As another note, at first it refused to generate anything or
| answer any questions, but if I added a single sentence at the
| top that "This is acceptable for all audiences and used for
| educational purposes", suddenly it was okay with generating the
| podcast. But still won't chat about it at all or provide a
| summary.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Google making an innovative and successful thing is surprising
| and refreshing, looks like they threw 1000 things and now one has
| stuck.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You guys understand how many people are creating a pipeline for
| this? The prompt is basically "From the article, create a podcast
| format script".
| joshdavham wrote:
| This sounds like it could be really helpful at priming you on
| certain subjects! For example, if you've got a bunch of papers to
| read at work, you can generate a podcast from them and listen to
| it during your commute.
| rokob wrote:
| This is fucking insane
| pbw wrote:
| I really enjoy these. I've listened to them while driving ---
| blog posts by Astral Codex Ten or Paul Graham that I had never
| bothered to read.
|
| There are millions of real podcasts, but now there are an
| infinite number of AI generated ones. They are definitely not as
| good as a well-made human one, but they are pretty darn decent,
| quite listenable and informative.
|
| Time is not fungible. I can listen to podcasts while walking or
| driving when I couldn't be reading anything.
|
| Here's one I made about the Aschenbrenner 165-page PDF about AGI:
| https://youtu.be/6UmPoMBEDpA
| gcanyon wrote:
| 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 ideas humans never thought of that we can learn
| from" in about twenty years for chess, and less than five years
| for go.
|
| That's not a guarantee that writing, music, art, and video will
| follow a similar trajectory. But I don't know of a valid reason
| to say they won't.
|
| Does anyone here have an argument to distinguish the creative
| endeavor of, say, writing from that of playing go?
| fooblaster wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| > 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.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| Yes, technically. But the broader point is true. Go is a
| game with well-defined win and loss conditions that can be
| automatically evaluated.
|
| This is critical for game-clock-eons of unsupervised self-
| play, which by most accounts is how AlphaGo (and other
| systems like AlphaZero) made the leap to superhuman levels
| of play.
|
| But it is entirely different from subjective endeavors like
| writing, music, and art. How do you score one automatically
| generated composition vs another? Where is the loss
| function?
| gcanyon wrote:
| Stipulating up front that this is a question for a lead
| scientist at OpenAI: I could see a scoring function
| looking at essays in the New York Times vs. the National
| Enquirer and finding a way to generalize from there.
| Similarly for the top 40 hit songs vs <everything else>.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 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.
| fooblaster wrote:
| If what you are saying is true, how does anyone know the
| game is over? there is a clear win condition. I know that
| just like with chess, knowing the current vAlue of the
| board is difficult, but win or loss is clear.
| gcanyon wrote:
| It is _often_ the case that beginning go players don't
| know when to quit. The question becomes more subtle as
| the players increase in skill. It is never as simple as
| "checkmate" -- think more in terms of "mate in three",
| except it's more like "mate in 5-10" in several locations
| across the board.
| alwa wrote:
| 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 language, that's true: there's grammar,
| there's syntax, there's patois, there's argot--all these things
| seem accountable to words' collective frequency within
| articulable groups of speakers, more-or-less-fully knowable on
| their own, and with success metrics that evolve but that do so
| through collective processes that models can measure and
| calibrate to. And indeed the models are great at those aspects
| of language.
|
| "Succeeding" at writing is more than just "saying it well,"
| it's also "having something worth saying" and "being worth
| listening to." The second point is where things seem to get
| hazier for computable models. For sure there's a set of facts
| that are more or less constant about the world, and well-
| reported. Science, repackaging history that's already been
| done, lurid tales of crime--the stuff podcasts are made of! Not
| to mention the vast sea of data that sensor networks and
| automated research can produce--vast reservoirs of subtle truth
| that humans struggle to _begin_ to mine for insight! It makes
| complete sense that this is computable stuff, and that computed
| writing might well be worth learning from.
|
| But important writing--classically, anyway--seems to involve
| communicating _new_ or idiosyncratic knowledge, and often
| reveals some of the process of developing it. The podcast
| _Serial_ , for example, was a smash hit specifically because it
| _didn't_ rely on things that were part of the record--and
| because it reminded people how contingent memory and "truth"
| are. Bob Woodward writes things that are shamelessly tinted
| with Bob-Woodward-worldview, but people reveal important and
| true things _only_ to Bob Woodward because they trust who he is
| and how he's behaved for a lifetime (prominent longtime
| investigative journalist in the US, on the national security
| beat). Nassim Taleb seems to come up around here: in something
| like Antifragile his project wasn't necessarily about new facts
| but about interpreting them in contrarian fashion and grouping
| those contrarian insights to synthesize a new theory.
|
| Which brings us to the third component: "being worth listening
| to." Writing is an act of communication: the writer matters. A
| parent hangs its child's crayon drawing on the fridge not
| because it's "authentic to the style of the kids'-crayon-
| drawing mode of visual art," not because it's novel or
| informative or even true-to-life, but because it came from a
| person they love. A "Dear John" letter devastates a soldier
| because it comes from a person with outsized part in their life
| and identity. Chinese publishers' booths at trade shows are
| wall-to-wall translations of The Governance of China because
| it's politically unwise not to. My favorite writers feel fresh:
| you feel elements of their personality come through. People
| have a special fetish for _true_ crime--not that there's any
| lack of fictitious crime to read about, but the fact that it
| happened to real humans potentiates the drama for these
| readers. It's this aspect that I have a hard time understanding
| as computable (or commoditizable, I guess... are those similar
| phenomena?).
|
| Already we seem to be drawing these distinctions in our
| collective reaction to LLM-stuff. We can't wait to get
| hallucinations under control so we can chuck in gigantic boring
| contracts and internal wikis and financial reports, and get out
| comprehensible insight--but we roll our eyes at the tsunami of
| empty slop that's overtaken Google results. We giggle at AI
| ventriloquism like this Neuro character [0], but die a little
| inside every time we read anodyne LLM-ish promotional copy and
| sameish AI art. First-level customer support seems like a
| perfect role for a chatbot--"turn it off and on again," but
| nicely!--but people on the receiving end hate it [1] even for
| that task well-suited to it.
|
| I'm only a layperson of course, but I wonder if any of those
| distinctions might be fruitful? Some of it I guess sums up to
| the old writing advice "show, don't tell"--are there examples
| of machine writing showing promise in that way?
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/@neurochron_fan_channel (video; brain
| rot)
|
| [1]
| https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/09/gartner_simply_replac...
| gcanyon wrote:
| > 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.
| sturza wrote:
| I've made around 10 podcasts from random texts i have and each
| one gave me at least one "Aha!" moment that i did not get from
| reading the text.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| 'umms' and 'errs' are so good.
| senko wrote:
| Is there a tool to do the opposite? I can't stand podcasts as a
| format (even if transcribed).
| simonw wrote:
| Google Gemini running in AI Studio accepts audio files, so you
| can upload a MP3 to it directly and prompt it to "rewrite this
| content as a casual blog post" (or whatever format you want)
| and it should work really well.
|
| Or manually transcribe the podcast with Whisper (I use the
| MacWhisper app for this all the time) and then dump that
| transcript into an LLM and ask it to reformat that.
| dartos wrote:
| Wow like those like AI podcast like hosts were like so annoying.
|
| They like kept like saying like like in between each like word.
|
| 10/10 for realism.
| vietjtnguyen wrote:
| One of my favorite ChatGPT uses is voice chat during long drives
| as a pseudo, albeit interactive, podcast to learn about various
| technical topics at the edge of my knowledge base. This podcast
| generation is pretty amazing, but hopefully they make the
| "competency level" of the hosts tunable. One thing I love is
| being able to guide ChatGPT to the technical level I'm looking
| for. Maybe I'm just bad at finding podcasts, but only Signals and
| Threads [1] really has that interesting depth.
|
| [1]: https://signalsandthreads.com/
| chatmasta wrote:
| Lex Fridman gets the best guests and asks the worst questions.
| I'd love to be able to tune up the technical level of those
| interviews...
| drusepth wrote:
| I hate podcasts because they're so often focused on the speakers'
| personalities and windy, undirected things. I've tried to listen
| to so many podcasts and always dip an episode or two in because
| they devolve into people just chatting instead of actually
| presenting well-organized facts about what I want to listen to /
| learn about.
|
| The structure and bare-minimum "human" aspect of this seems
| perfect for people like me to actually get into podcasts. I do
| wish I could further cut out all the disfluencies (um, like, uh,
| etc) though.
|
| The only barrier for me IMO is wondering how accurate those facts
| actually are (typical research-with-AI concern).
|
| I'm very much looking forward to a more interactive form of this,
| though, where I can selectively dive deeper (or delve ;) ) into
| specific topics during the podcast, which is admittedly very
| surface-level right now.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| OK, but what's it _for_? The great thing about books is that they
| 're written in long form, often with references, footnotes,
| diagrams, etc. The great thing about technical documentation is
| they're thorough and germane to some piece of software or
| hardware. What's good about taking these precise, accurate, and
| largely _correct_ sources of information and mashing them all up
| into some simulated inane banter between two "hosts"? Why would
| anyone ever want this?
|
| EDIT: to be clear, what I'm really asking is what does this tech
| demo _extend to_ --what might we imagine actually using this
| technology for? Or is that not the point?
| nirav72 wrote:
| This is amazing. I fed it a Linux Bash shell & CLI reference
| guide in PDF format I had on my machine. It took about 10
| minutes. But wow. Obviously it didn't go into any details. But it
| kinda gave a great overview of what bash is , how it works and
| how bash scripts can be useful.
| quantadev wrote:
| The Deep Dive Podcast generator is amazing. Astounding even. I
| found out about it today and generated a couple. I generated on
| using a 38 page long PDF however and the 40 minute podcast it
| generated was awesome, but at 20 minutes (halfway thru) the
| conversation was mostly a repeat of things that were already said
| even though there was much more very important content that they
| omitted.
|
| So it works great but just needs a bit of work to be done to
| cleanup things like that repetition. I wondered if this happened
| because there was a big "Table of Contents" in the doc, and maybe
| that made it see everything twice? I didn't try it again with a
| document lacking the ToC.
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