NotebookLM has been making the rounds lately, as one of the most interesting textual analysis offerings on the nascent AI market. I got pulled into it the night it launched and have been more or less processing the ideas it sparked ever since. The problem for me as a writer is that a lot of the stuff I tend to write about falls into the “heady” sort of space that mostly readers seem to enjoy, but have trouble getting into. So there’s this gap of interest at the beginning of my typical reader’s journey and it seems like a lot of people don’t quite get across it. The goal I have in writing this piece is to share a new tool that I think can really help, especially if you’re in a similar situation to mine and need to find new ways to reach your audience.
NotebookLM is a Google technology available here:
You can upload texts to it and have it parse them for you. For me, the most remarkable thing about the generated podcast is that it feels like a natural conversation between two people who are reasonably informed about the works it is sourced from. It isn’t the case that a listener will understand everything about the books that went into it, but nonetheless the content produced is interesting and powerful as an access point for the work.
That’s the major point of value I see for technologies such as this one, as even some of the smartest people I know have sometimes struggled to really gain access to the things I write!
I’ll go ahead and provide a link to the podcast I actually made and enjoyed so much so that you can, too, if you like:
In my opinion, the important thing is that we’re seeing new technologies and new use-cases forming left and right these days. The new Claude3.5 upgrade has been remarkable to work with as well.
I am using Claude to code a project to deliver a psychological experiment for my lab, so it’s always a pleasure to see improvements to it, but ultimately I fully do expect there to be a substantial amount of progress in terms of automating the development process.
The thing to really keep your eye on these days is the impact that these technologies actually have on your workflow. Success as an innovator in today’s market will almost invariably involve building a deep grasp of the powerful new technologies that we, and our competition, will have access to as they continue to roll out. Flexibility as a consumer of AI is going to be a key skill as time marches onward.
For my part, I hope to continue to develop top quality high-level thoughts that work well in terms of logic and manage to maintain consistency with scientific consensus. It's a promising moment for myself and those like me when we have the opportunity to reach a wider audience without fundamentally changing anything about our writing style or content creation flow. NotebookLM's bolt-on advanced text digestion function will help us with this, just as Claude can help us code and thousands of other tools vie to help us solve our toughest cognitive challenges.
