I’ve seen glimpses of how AI will change the world, and it frightens and amazes me in equal measure.
What baffles me is Google NotebookLM. With one click of any article, blog post, or web page, NotebookLM creates an audio file of two people talking about it. The audio is so natural and lifelike that you’d never guess you weren’t listening to two actual people talking. They speak with passion and authority about the subject, with rapt interest, and repeat themselves to each other in a breathtakingly natural way. They sound completely human, with little snorts, slight mispronunciations, slurred pronunciations, and even little laughs.
Here’s what happened: In my spare time, I write a blog about Tai Chi called Tai Chi Notebook, so when I heard about NotebookLM (the fact that it has “notebook” in the name is just a coincidence), I thought I’d submit one of my Tai Chi articles and see what happens.
Creating the audio was easy. It took a few minutes of thinking, but it quickly generated a .WAV file that I could download to my desktop. The audio clip lasted about 8 minutes, and after listening to it, the world looked completely different. I no longer had confidence in my ability to tell what was real and what wasn’t.
The AI took my article and explained the key concepts through a conversational “presenter,” taking it in new and interesting directions I hadn’t thought of and likening what I was saying to other areas of life. The presenter also gave examples of what I was talking about, but these examples were not taken from my article but from their own extensive knowledge of the subject. And, most importantly, the AI got it right!
Let’s see what you think:
Watch now
The dawn of the AI era
Clearly, we are just at the beginning of a new AI era, with major players such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and most recently Apple Intelligence just getting started. NotebookLM doesn’t have many options right now, you can speed up or slow down the playback speed, but it won’t be long before you can choose the presenter’s type, accent, expertise, political leanings, personality, and once AI-generated videos become the norm, even the look. As I wrote recently, AI is already being used in movies, and you can imagine a world where movies are generated on the fly and plots change on a whim.
Sure, this may sound scary to some, but the movie is a fantasy that already exists in a fantasy world. What worries me the most is when AI invades the real world. I have a friend whose daughter is currently applying to colleges, and he says that many colleges are saying they don’t even need applications anymore because so many of them have been altered using AI that they are almost meaningless.
All of this brings me back to NotebookLM, which allows me to create an amazing podcast from one of my articles with the click of a button, and it feels like a big change is on the way in which media is created. I don’t know what’s true anymore, but I’ll just have to get used to it.
