Google's AI Podcast Creator: A Revolutionary Tool Raising Ethical Concerns

This Google experiment can turn any link, article, or document into a professional podcast -- try it yourself for free

Google's NotebookLM can turn anything into entertaining white noise, and it doesn't cost a dime While Google continues to push its Gemini assistant to the forefront regarding its public-facing AI efforts, there are plenty of other AI projects the company is cooking up that don't receive the same attention. NotebookLM is a prime example of one of Google's impressive free-to-use hidden gems for AI tools -- designed to expand, summarize, and organize your writing while generating ideas for how to construct your next project. It can transform a few loose notes into a fleshed-out document, giving you a great foundation for your next YouTube script, school assignment, or even briefings for your next business meeting. The tool has been around since July 2023 and has been steadily improving ever since. NotebookLM is now running on Gemini 1.5 Pro and is capable of generating charts and diagrams in its results, as well as fact-checking itself by providing sources that accompany its points. However, one of the latest features of Google's AI writing aid is its audio overview option, which can produce stunningly rich audio conversations from a list of your selected sources. It's so good, it's hard to believe how easy and fast it is to generate. And if you have your doubts, let's highlight an example Laptop Mag has generated to showcase the feature further. The above near-ten-minute audio exchange riffs on our recently published Meta Quest 3 vs. Meta Quest 3S face-off article, with both hosts playing off of one another's points as they reveal what we can expect from Meta's latest AR/VR headset when it's unveiled at tomorrows Meta Connect 2024 keynote. However, the hosts in question aren't Laptop Mag writers or editors, nor are they interested third-parties covering the news and using our article as a source. In fact, the hosts of this particular micro-podcast aren't even real people, just AI-generated voices following a dynamic AI script to best deliver the contents of the supplied article in audio form. Despite their emotive engagement with the subject, their effortless back-and-forths, and engaging, well-researched discussion, this ten minutes of audio was generated in five minutes using nothing but the copied contents of the original article. Once generated, NotebookLM allows you to download the sample, where you can then upload it to your platform of choice to share with others or take into an editing program to spruce things up as you see fit. The results are pretty remarkable, with only a few audio glitches or pronunciation issues throughout the entirety of our ten-minute sample. How the hosts interact and engage with one another is perhaps the most impressive element of NotebookLM's audio overview feature, delivering very convincing (almost too convincing at times) and compelling points and arguments that feel natural and thought through. With a feature like this, NotebookLM could be a fantastic companion to those needing to research long-form writings, those looking to compact detailed articles into bite-size forms on the go, or even podcasters who are looking for a more solid structure for how their segments should be laid out. It's the white-noise savior of students who soak up information by proxy and a great way to pick out the more interesting and key points from any piece of writing to be delivered in an engaging way. Perhaps one of the most compelling things about Google's NotebookLM is that it's absolutely free and incredibly simple to use. If you want to give the company's writing aid a try for yourself, you can do so just by visiting the NotebookLM homepage at https://notebooklm.google and clicking "Try NotebookLM" before signing in with your Google Account. From here you can create a new notebook, which starts with you adding sources. You can add up to 50 sources, with the more sources used typically resulting in a longer audio overview at the end of the process. You can pull sources from various places, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, webpages, and even copied text from the clipboard. With your sources compiled, you can instantly generate an audio overview that will discuss the topic at hand using your supplied sources, or you can continue refining what you'd like help to do using the Gemini chat window at the base of the page or the shortcut suggestions at the top of the page. When you're ready, click "Generate" in the audio overview section of the Notebook guide and NotebookLM will create the two-host conversation. All you have to do is wait and then be amazed by the eventual outcome.

Fake AI "podcasters" are reviewing my book and it's freaking me out

NotebookLM's "Audio Summaries" show a more personable future for AI-generated content. Further ReadingAs someone who has been following the growth of generative AI for a while now, I know that the technology can be pretty good (if not quite human-level) at quickly summarizing complex documents into a more digestible form. But I still wasn't prepared for how disarmingly compelling it would be to listen to Google's NotebookLM condense my recent book about Minesweeper into a tight, 12.5-minute, podcast-style conversation between two people that don't exist. There are still enough notable issues with NotebookLM's audio output to prevent it from fully replacing professional podcasters any time soon. Even so, the podcast-like format is an incredibly engaging and endearing way to take in complex information and points to a much more personable future for generative AI than the dry back-and-forth of a text-based chatbot. Hey! Listen! Listen to NotebookLM's 12.5-minute summary of my Minesweeper book using the player above. Google's NotebookLM launched over a year ago as "a virtual research assistant that can summarize facts, explain complex ideas, and brainstorm new connections -- all based on the sources you select." Just last week, though, Google added the new "Audio Overview" feature that it's selling as "a new way to turn your documents into engaging audio discussions." Google doesn't use the word "podcast" anywhere in that announcement, instead talking up audio creations that "summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth." But Wharton AI professor Ethan Mollick correctly refered to the style as a "podcast" in a recent social media post sharing a NotebookLM Audio Overview of his book. Mollick called these Audio Summaries "the current best 'wow this is amazing & useful' demo of AI" and "unnerving, too", and we have to agree on both counts. Inspired by Mollick's post, I decided to feed my own book into NotebookLM to see what its virtual "podcasters" would make of 30,000 or so words about '90s Windows gaming classic Minesweeper (believe it or not, I could have written much more). Just a few minutes later, I was experiencing a reasonable facsimile of what it would be like if I was featured on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour or a similar banter-filled podcast. Just the facts? NotebookLM's summary hits on all the book's major sections: the pre-history of the games that inspired Minesweeper; the uphill battle for the Windows Entertainment Pack at a business-focused Microsoft of the '90s; the moral panic over the game's pre-installation on millions of business and government computers; and the surprising cheating controversies that surrounded the game's competitive scene. Sure, I could quibble about which specific bits the summary decided to focus on and/or leave out (maybe feeding different chapters individually would have led to more detail in the collected summaries). But anyone listening to this "podcast" would get the same general overview of my book that they would listening to one of the many actual podcasts that I did after the book launched. While there weren't any full-blown, whole cloth hallucinations in NotebookLM's summary "podcast," there were a few points where it got small details wrong or made assumptions that weren't supported in the text. Discussing Minesweeper predecessor Mined-Out, for instance, NotebookLM's audio summary says, "So this is where those squares and flags start to come into play..." even though Mined-Out had neither feature. Then there's the portion where the summary-cast mentions a senator that called Minesweeper "a menace to the republic," repeating the quote for emphasis. That definitely captures the spirit of Senator Lauch Faircloth's tirade against Minesweeper and other games being pre-installed on government computers. In the "podcast" context, though, it sounds like the voices are putting words in Faircloth's mouth by sharing a direct quote. Small, overzealous errors like these -- and a few key bits of the book left out of the podcast entirely -- would give me pause if I were trying to use a NotebookLM summary as the basis for a scholarly article or piece of journalism. But I could see using a summary like this to get some quick Cliff's Notes-style grounding on a thick tome I didn't have the time or inclination to read fully. And, unlike poring through Cliff's Notes, the pithy, podcast-style format would actually make for enjoyable background noise while out on a walk or running errands.

I tried Google's new one-click AI podcast creator, and now I don't know what's real anymore

I've had a glimpse of how AI will change the world, and it's filling me with both fear and wonder in equal measure. The source of my consternation is Google NotebookLM. NotebookLM takes an article, blog post, or web page, and with just one click produces an audio file of a conversation between two people about it that sounds so natural and realistic that there is no way you'd believe you weren't listening to two real people talking. They talk with passion and authority about the subject, sound engaged and interested and riff off one another in such a natural way that it takes your breath away. There are even the little sniffs, slight mispronunciations, slurs, and little giggles that all make it sound completely human. Here's what happened. In my spare time I write a blog about Tai Chi called the Tai Chi Notebook. So, having heard about NotebookLM (the 'notebook' in the name is just a coincidence) I thought I'd throw one of my Tai Chi articles at it, just to see what it did. Creating the audio is easy. It took it a few minutes to think about it, but it very quickly generated a .WAV file that I could download to my desktop. The audio clip lasted around eight minutes and after I'd listened to it, the world simply wasn't the same anymore; I no longer had confidence that I could tell what was real and what wasn't. The AI had taken my article and explained the key concepts via the 'presenters' having a conversation. It had even expanded on it in new and interesting directions that I hadn't thought of, drawing analogies about what I was saying to other areas of life. The presenters had even introduced practical examples of what I was talking about, and these examples weren't taken from my article but from their wider knowledge of the subject. And, most importantly, it didn't get any of it wrong. See what you think: Obviously, we're just at the start of the new AI-age at the moment, with key players such as ChatGPT, Gemini and more recently Apple Intelligence only just getting started. NotebookLM doesn't have that many options right now - you can speed up or slow down playback and that's about it - but it won't be long before it lets you choose the type of presenter you want, their accent, their expertise, their political leaning, their personality and, once we move into AI-generated video as standard, how they look. As I wrote recently, AI is already being used in films, and we can imagine a world where a movie is generated on the fly, with the plot changing to suit your whims. Yes, this will sound terrifying to some, but movies are already flights of fancy that exist in the world of the imagination. It's when AI intrudes on the real world that I get most concerned. I've got a friend whose daughter is applying for university right now, and he tells me that many institutions are saying they don't require a personal statement anymore because so many are doctored using AI that there's little point to them. All of which brings me back to NotebookLM. It can already produce a fantastic podcast out of one of my articles at the click of a button, and it feels like we're on the dawn of a very big change in the way media is produced. I'm not sure I know what's real anymore, and that's something I'm just going to have to get used to.