OK, AI Has Finally Found A Way To Freak Me Out
...Or I'm Impressed. I'm Not Sure.
It seems AI is here to stay. It doesn’t matter if you’re building images or making music, I’m feeling now more than ever artificial intelligence isn’t some sort of fad. And while I’m tired of the notion of people saying that AI is going to be taking all of our jobs (because frankly, I got too many jobs to begin with, PLEASE take some of these jobs off my hands), I can’t deny it seems like the machines are getting smarter day by day.
A friend hit me up the other day with a desire of being on my podcast, Knew Amsterdam Radio. She wanted to promote a brand new app (Also powered by AI, but that’s a different issue) and wanted to give me a bit of a primer before the show. OK, this usually comes in the form of a PDF or an e-mail, but I finally got a taste of an AI platform that gave me a bit of a jolt.
In 2023, Google launched its “Notebook LM,” application. Touted as a “notetaking service,” it essentially allows you to create workspaces where you can dump documents, references, and other information into one location, and since artificial intelligence has parsed the information, it then allows you to query the AI against those aforementioned documents. Think of it as a ChatGPT, but it only works on the specific mini-sandbox you built with your reference materials. Check out this overview video:
Okay, big deal, right? I’ve written about AI a couple of times. But Notebook LM has an “Audio Overview” feature where it would generate two human voices DISCUSSING what was uploaded into the workspace. In other words, it totally can be used as an AI podcast generator. And the wild thing? In some instances, you don’t even have to upload the documents. After I tossed in one of my old screenplays and got a pretty accurate review on it (or more of a plot summary in the strict sense ), I decided to make a clean workspace. I just uploaded this website URL into the system and asked Notebook LM to give me an Audio Overview of JustTheSandwich.com. The result?
Friggin’ surreal, right?!
It gets my name right. There is a format and structure for the “show.” They call out things that don’t fit the profile of this blog (Indeed, my article about JetBlue is kind of weird). It totally feels like two friends are having a show about my dumb sandwich.
Is it perfect? No. At the 5-minute mark they erroneously state the “Hawk Tuah” girl went viral for being a fan of Star Wars. Also, for some reason, some of the articles are mentioned a second time after the 12:30 timestamp. There’s also the issue of the breathing patterns of the hosts being a little odd but you really have to be listening closely. But other than that? I was blown away. I felt like I had some digital friends that only existed to support your boy.
(By the way, if you want to listen to the podcast that started me down this rabbit hole, go ahead and click here.)
Either way: I’m impressed, AI is taking over, and here’s the alternate image for this article that I didn’t end up using. I’m out!
