The podcasts generated by Google’s NotebookLM service are “surprisingly effective”. (Whether this says more about the current state of podcasts or AI is an open question…)
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Discussion 3 comments
I’ve used this a couple of times and it really is a bit disarming how good it is. I uploaded a couple of personal documents and got goosebumps when they started talking about me.
The Reddit thread where the podcast hosts discover they’re AI and spiral into an existential crisis is very much worth reading.
My appraisal exactly: it mimics the form astonishingly well, and has all its generic weaknesses.
I had a lot of fun playing around with this. I think it might actually be useful to me for getting the gist of dense medical journal articles before I dive in to look at the data, or for getting a general sense of some other ideas in a low stakes way.
I enjoyed throwing it a few of the non-narrative chapters of Moby Dick—it managed to talk cogently about the implicit themes to a certain extent, not just the explicit ones. So that was cool.
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