Where do you get the "low-quality" part from - my experience with NotebookLM is that they create much higher quality, more informative, more fact based, and more concise podcasts than 99% of the stuff I listen to. I've mostly switched entirely over to NotebookLM for my podcast listening. They, generally, offer a far higher quality experience from my perspective.
Maybe you have the problem backwards - we accidentally end up listening to non NotebookLM podcasts?
Yes. For example I fed it a public tender and associated regulations in Norwegian and it was able to answer questions about the parts I mas interested in correctly and succinctly. I have also fed it research papers that normally I would not have the patience or knowledge to go through on my own.
In terms of actual usefulness, it’s one of the AI tools that most impressed me.
The main issue is, of course, privacy.
I have tried to reproduce something similar using AnythingLLM and the low tier Llama models, but of course the experience is much worse, both in terms of results, response times and UI. If someone knows of a better local setup, I’m all ears.
I would consider a Workspace subscription if I could actually trust Google to make good on the commitment of not reading your stuff, which I’m finding hard to do…
Personally, I hate even the idea of an AI made podcast, because to me podcasts are personal and emotional. They're about the individual humans who make them. They're not just a source of "information".
I'm glad there are different kinds of podcasts for different people now.
I've always absolutely hated the focus on the individual humans and their personalities behind the podcast, and wished they'd be a better source of well-structured "information".
I never listened to a podcast I didn't get frustrated with, even at 2x speed. These NotebookLM podcasts have been exactly what I've always wished podcasts were.
It's interesting assumption that by virtue of being AI generated, it's considered bad/fake. 20 years ago, people hated how photoshop changed the photo design industry, NotebookLM is knocking on the door now.
I'm excited by AI, but I've also tried using this specific one to generate a podcast based on one of my own blog posts and will only try again due to this product announcement rather than because I think the state of the art is already "there".
On the plus side, the speech is almost perfect; so good, that I sincerely hope the voices themselves are never fully under user control.
With regards to the actual summary of the content I gave them, I would say they are grade B: only mostly correct, they're still inventing things I didn't say and missing things I did say.
That's not to say humans don't make mistakes, I still consider this objectively impressive, that is able to reach even this level was SciFi when I was a kid — but why waste time on a grade-B podcast when the AAA-tier costs you as a consumer a 30 second advert?
There's an ethical/moral-luck dilemma at the heart of this.
If a AAA-tier podcast on the subject you want to listen to a podcast about exists (and you know about it), then that's probably a better (and obvious) choice for your listening time.
However, if you want to listen to someone discuss or explain something and you don't know about a AAA-tier podcast, it's possible that a generated podcast is better than nothing.
On the other hand, it's also possible that the generated podcast will miss or hallucinate a key detail, and herein lies the dilemma. Is it better to listen to something that might get something wrong, or not to listen and perhaps someday to learn about the subject through some other form that is less likely to include mistakes?
Interesting, are there any podcasts in particular that you recommend? Everything I’ve heard from it just seems like the most banal, cookie cutter stereotype of a podcast with nothing but extremely surface level summarization of a given article, peppered with random cliches and fake sounding reactions “Wow! ok, so let’s hear more about that. I’m intrigued!” “OK, let’s dive deep.” Etc.
There’s a normal, human generated podcast called Deep Dive: AI (https://deepdive.opensource.org/). There’s also a confusingly similar named podcast Deep Dive AI that appears to only have one episode and is NotebookLM generated. Which one are you referring to?
Edit: If I'm understanding it correctly after some googling, supposedly the "name" of all podcasts generated by NotebookLM is "Deep Dive"? That's just confusing.
Its trained on too many shallow podcasts. Go compare any of NotebookLM podcast with an episode of Hardcore History. The latter goes into much more depth (even when you account of it being much longer).
I think OP is presenting a different problem: while this tool gives the possibility of creating good quality podcasts, it also enables spammers to quickly generate tons of garbage episodes just to profit from the advertisement they put in it.
Goody, let’s just drive out all the human creators who actually interview real experts and go in depth on a subject, with AI-generated voices and summaries.
If AI ends up destroying humanity, it isn’t going to be through weapons and death robots, but just by entertaining and placating us all to death.
Maybe you have the problem backwards - we accidentally end up listening to non NotebookLM podcasts?