I Can See the Future. You Can, Too. (Seriously. The Future. Except, You Know, Now.)

By Kevin LaCroix on October 7, 2024

After the November 2022 debut of ChatGPT, the public commentariat pitched itself into a virtual frenzy declaring AI’s transformative or even catastrophic potential. However, from my perspective, the reality of AI, at least so far, is that, while AI-powered tools are sometimes impressive and occasionally amazing, the AI-generated results are sometimes clunky or non-responsive and often error-filed. I am skeptical of much of the AI hype.

However, over this past weekend, I used a new AI-powered tool that absolutely blew my mind. For the first time ever, I see the sheer raw potential of AI – and yes, I now see its transformative power as well.

What was the source of this personal AI transfiguration? It is a new tool from Google called NotebookLM. It is a remarkably simple-to-use application that enables you to assemble a set of resources, upload them into a file, and, in essence produce a podcast, called a Deep Dive. The podcast, or what Google calls an “audio overview,” is a chatty 10-minute conversation between two articulate speakers summarizing the information you uploaded.

Here’s the thing. The two speakers sound like people. To be sure, white, middle-class, English-speaking Americans, but people. But they are not people. The voices, one male and one female, are entirely AI-generated, as is everything they say. You literally won’t believe your ears.

Ben Cohen wrote about NotebookLM in an October 4, 2024, Wall Street Journal article entitled “There’s a New Hit Podcast That Will Blow Your Mind” (here). He describes the tool as “the most compelling and completely flabbergasting demonstrations of AI’s potential yet.” In his October 7, 2024, column, The Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler, describing his first experience with NotebookLM by saying “I was gobsmacked.”

The AI-generated podcast sounds – completely realistically – like a conversation between two actual people. Their voices modulate, they change pace, they crack jokes, they interrupt with normal conversational interjections like “For sure!” or “Totally agree.” Even more amazingly, the speakers make serious, interesting, and original observations.

What kind of topics can NotebookLM make a podcast about? Well, basically, anything. In his Journal article, Cohen writes that he had the tool make a podcast about the Federal Register. He also suggests other possibilities: “Wikipedia pages. YouTube clips. Random PDFs. Your college thesis. Your notes from that business meeting last week. Your grandmother’s lasagna recipe. Your resume. Your credit-card bill! This week, I listened to an entire podcast about my 401(k).”

In his Washington Post column, Fowler said this new tool represents “A new way for people to learn and do research about all sorts of things, from taking the legalese out of legal briefs to digesting a dense reading assignment for school. It’s CliffsNotes, but democratized to any book, article, interview, webpage, chart, video or notes or you can upload.”

After reading Cohen’s Journal article, I decided I had to give this tool a try. So here’s what I did. I went to the NotebookLM webpage (here). (In order to access the page and use the tool, you must have a Google account.) In the dialog box captioned “Upload Source,” I added links to all the posts from this blog in which I have written about Paris. I then hit the “Generate” button. It takes the app a few minutes to process the information and generate the podcast. But in less than ten minutes from the first moment I opened the NotebookLM webpage, I had a complete podcast.

My experience of listening to the podcast exactly tracked that of a commentator Cohen quoted in his Journal article: “I don’t know whether to be amazed or terrified.”

The Paris podcast the tool created so far exceeded my expectations that I don’t even know for sure how to convey it here. I wish I could link here directly to the podcast, and maybe there is a way to do it, but I couldn’t figure out how. Commendably, Google has put a lot of privacy and intellectual property controls in place. So instead of linking to my podcast here, I set out at the end of this post exact step by step directions for to follow to hear the podcast yourself.

The first amazing thing about the podcast is the speakers. They sound like real people. OK, every now and then, they mispronounce things. (My last name gave them trouble.) But their enthusiastic summaries of my Paris write-ups literally gave me goose bumps. They praised my “attention to sensory details that makes his writing so immersive,” noting further that my “enthusiasm is obvious,” and that while I did visit some of the usual tourist sites, my descriptions “always have their own unique spin.” The speakers correctly and even creatively identified the most interesting parts. They picked out details to emphasize, such as my visit to Chopin’s grave at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. They selected out a small but interesting grace note, my observation that Chopin’s heart is not buried in his grave in Paris, but back in his hometown of Warsaw. After observing that I had enjoyed picnics both in the Jardin du Luxembourg and on the steps opposite the Eiffel Tower, the male voice observed “this man sure does like his picnics, doesn’t he?”

The Parisian travelogue was an interesting first test for the tool, but I decided that I need to try something a little more technical, requiring a little more heavy lifting. I organized and created another Deep Dive, using the various articles in my “Nuts and Bolts of D&O” series that you can find in the right-hand column on this website. The series consists of eight articles. I cut and pasted the URLs for the eight articles into the “Upload Sources” dialog box on the NotebookLM website, hit the “Generate” button, and waited five or six minutes. The result was a roughly fifteen-minute audible summary, produced in a chatty dialog format.

Admittedly, the summary about D&O insurance was not as entertaining as the Paris travelogue, but it was still an interesting summary, and in a conversational style. For example, the female voice, opening a new topic, says “Indemnification. That word always throws me off a little bit.” It also turns out, she says, that indemnification is “essential, but not foolproof,” and she describe the policyholder conditions in the D&O insurance policy as “like a high stakes game of red light-green light.”

Having conducted these two tests, and several others I launched for my own amusement, I am deeply impressed with the power of this tool. There are, Cohen notes in his Journal article, many reasons you might want to turn information into conversation: “Productivity. Creativity. Inspiration. Education.” Maybe you are just an auditory learner. Maybe you want the same information in a different way to spark new ideas. Fowler suggests downloading your homework into a podcast so that you could listen to a summary of it at the gym. Why, it occurs to me, you could even upload a D&O Diary post so that you could listen to a podcast summary of it while on your commute.

All of this is great. But the real meaning of this new tool to me is not just its ability to create podcasts. It is that it is just so good. This tool does what it does so impressively, it makes me think, it really wouldn’t take much to take it the next step, of, for example, adding video. And not just video of the two speakers talking, but perhaps of them acting out what they are talking about. Or adding additional speakers, or additional formats – not just the podcast format, but, say, strangers at a cocktail party having a conversation, or a coach conducting a training session. How about a Professor giving a lecture? The key element here is the creativity involved in creating the dialogs. It suggests, to me at least, a whole new universe of possibilities.

In his Journal article, Cohen, describing his experience in trying NotebookLM, observed that there “have only been two times when I had my mind blown by AI. The first was my introduction to ChatGPT. This was the second.” I have to say for me, my encounter with NotebookLM is really the first time my mind has been blown by AI. For the first time, I have a true sense of what is behind all of the hype.

I also experienced visceral fear as well. One of the recurring questions in the general AI conversation is whether AI is coming for your job. Listening to the NotebookLM podcasts, for the first time I had a serious thought that maybe AI really is coming for your job. This tool is still new, but I just think of its creators can create this, think about what the possibilities are once the really get going. After all, who needs an actual professor giving a lecture if an AI avatar can deliver the lecture instead, complete with wise cracks, witty quotations, and interesting asides?

Transformative. I really now do see how AI can be – and arguably already is – transformative.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to add here that in his Washington Post column, the tech writer Fowler added some important concerns. First, he noted that after a while, the two AI voices did start to sound a little bit stale. The charming banter began to be less delightful after listening to a few of the podcasts. He also asked whether the contents of the podcasts were succinct, or perhaps just shallow? Even more troublesome, Fowler cites research suggesting that like other AI-powered tools, NotebookLM can “can go off in its own weird directions,” miss subtlety, or overemphasize the wrong things. No doubt, caution is advised, as with any AI tool. In my mind, these concerns, while valid, do not overcome the value of the tool.

How to Make a Paris Podcast for Yourself:

First, go to the NotebookLM webpage, here, and click on the Try NotebookLM button.

Second, if the website does not automatically open the “Upload Sources” dialog box, click on the “+” in the center of the New Notebook image.
Third, scroll down the Upload Sources dialog box to find where it says Link, and click on the Website button. That will open a text box for you to paste in URLs for the website pages you want to have summarized. Unfortunately, you have to add the URLs one at a time. If the Uploads Sources dialog box does not reappear after you have added one address, click on “+” next to the work “Sources” in the left hand column.

Fourth, here are the Paris travel blogs from this site: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. You definitely don’t need to upload all of the posts, four or five are probably more than sufficient, but the result will be richer if you upload more posts.