by alphabetting on 10/17/24, 4:42 PM with 127 comments
by wenbin on 10/17/24, 7:09 PM
https://github.com/ListenNotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts/bl...
Google is taking a different approach this time, moving quickly. While NotebookLM is indeed a remarkable tool for personal productivity and learning, it also opens the door for spammers to mass-produce content that isn't meant for human consumption.
Amidst all the praise for this project, I’d like to offer a different perspective. I hope the NotebookLM team sees this and recognizes the seriousness of the spam issue, which will only grow if left unaddressed. If you know someone on the team, please bring this to their attention - Could you please provide a tool or some plain-English guidelines to help detect audio generated by NotebookLM? Is there a watermark or any other identifiable marker that can be used?
Just recently, a Hacker News post highlighted how nearly all Google image results for "baby peacock" are AI-generated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41767648
It won't be long before we see a similar trend with low-quality, AI-generated fake podcasts flooding the internet.
by danpalmer on 10/17/24, 10:32 PM
There was a vast improvement in quality from giving it a prompt when generating the overview. The generic un-prompted overview was for entirely the wrong audience, in our case users of our infrastructure rather than the developers. When instructing it to generate an overview for the SRE team and what they should focus on it was far better.
Was it useful for our in-depth analysis, no. Would I listen to one based on the last 100 postmortems for a new team I joined, absolutely. As an overview it was ideal, pulling out common themes from a lot of data and getting some of the vibe right too.
by wg0 on 10/17/24, 10:28 PM
Google of course is the birthplace of attention is all you need.
by marviel on 10/18/24, 12:37 AM
Improvements over NotebookLM:
(1) You can start with just a subject, and you don't need a full document to begin (though you can do that too![1])
(2) The podcast generates much faster
(3) The podcasts are interactive -- you can ask the hosts to change direction mid podcast, and they will do so.
(4) (Coming soon) You'll be able to make a Spotify-style Queue of Podcast topics, which you can add to as you encounter new ideas.
The primary tradeoff is that the voices / personalities are somewhat less engaging than NotebookLM at this time, though this will be dramatically improved over the coming months.
This is all in addition to the core value proposition, which is roughly "AI Generated Duolingo for Any Subject".
It's early days, but I'd love for you all to check it out and give me feedback :)
[1] Documents are currently heavily length-limited but this will be improved shortly
by cpitman on 10/17/24, 6:19 PM
by OutOfHere on 10/17/24, 7:04 PM
audience=technical, duration=long, tone=professional & engaging
by buro9 on 10/18/24, 11:38 AM
On a web forum I am admin on, a user opened a DM a week ago titled "Google Notebook LM", someone else had shared a generated podcast thing that summarised the view of the forum on a particular subject, and it called out the usernames of someone who had strong opinions.
In response, another user ran with this and asked for a podcast to be generated summarising everything that was said by the user, their political views and all their hot takes.
Erm... uh-oh.
The use of real identity, the use of the same username across multiple sites, now makes it trivial for things like "take this Github username, find what sites the same username exists on, make a narrative of everything they've ever said, find the best and worst of what they've ever said"... which is terrifying.
I've said to the user the same old line we always repeat, "anything placed on the internet is effectively public forever", but only now are the consequences of this really being seen.
The forums I run allow username changes, encourage anonymity as much as possible, but we're at a point where multiple online identities, one for every site, interest, employer, etc... is probably the best way to go.
I notice on HN that there are many accounts that seem to register just to comment on particular stories and nothing more, and the comments are constructive and well thought out, and now I wonder whether some are just ahead of the curve on this — obscuring the totality of their identity from future employers, or anyone else who might use their words against them.
It feels like our lightweight choices in the past will start to have significant consequences in the present or future, and it's only a failure of imagination that is delaying a change in user behaviour.
by ddtaylor on 10/17/24, 10:00 PM
I'm still getting the tooling right so that the videos will get made in a better and more consistent schedule.
by WesleyLivesay on 10/17/24, 7:25 PM
Something like this:
The two podcast hosts have very different levels of knowledge on the topic. The first host is the expert on the topic and explains the subject and the details to the second host. The second host has very little existing knowledge about the subject but will react to the information and ask follow up questions.
by quantadev on 10/17/24, 10:26 PM
https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy
Developer's twitter: @souzatharsis
by xnx on 10/17/24, 6:20 PM
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=NotebookLM...
by KaoruAoiShiho on 10/17/24, 6:52 PM
by realty_geek on 10/18/24, 8:02 AM
https://github.com/etewiah/awesome-notebooklm
Will be interesting to see what new ideas NotebookLM leads to. I feel this is how custom GPTs should have been launched. OpenAI is on the backfoot here.
by aldanor on 10/17/24, 7:04 PM
Really. "Using"? (as in an email from an org owned domain logged in to notebooklm page?..)
by thedangler on 10/17/24, 7:55 PM
by kgarten on 10/19/24, 9:42 AM
Just posted some ISWC, MobileHCI and UbiComp papers, UIST is up next.
by scarface_74 on 10/17/24, 7:50 PM
Google has the attention span and product focus of a crack addled flea. I’m afraid the entire project will be killed.
NotebookLM is a great product. I just started using it this week to ingest artifacts for a new project and get an overview.
by whatever1 on 10/17/24, 8:04 PM
by deng on 10/18/24, 8:58 AM
by hactually on 10/17/24, 9:57 PM
People building on top of this will likely want to know what the Open Source / non doomed version will be!
by gigel82 on 10/17/24, 7:10 PM
by juthen on 10/21/24, 7:00 AM
by yieldcrv on 10/17/24, 10:11 PM
by jsemrau on 10/17/24, 7:00 PM
by tqwhite on 10/17/24, 7:08 PM
by simonw on 10/17/24, 6:25 PM
You are both pelicans who work as data
journalist at a pelican news service.
Discuss this from the perspective of
pelican data journalists, being sure
to inject as many pelican related
anecdotes as possible
Against this article: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/video-scraping/You can listen to the 7m40s resulting MP4 here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/notebooklm-pelicans/
Example snippets:
You ever find yourself wading through
mountains of data trying to pluck out
the juicy bits? It's like hunting for
a single shrimp in a whole kelp forest,
am I right?
And: The future of data journalism is
looking brighter than a school of
silversides reflecting the morning sun.
Until next time, keep those wings
spread, those eyes sharp, and those
minds open. There's a whole ocean
of data out there just waiting to be
explored.