13 ms·

NotebookLM's is incredibly good at generating the affect and structure of a quality podcast. This is in-line with all art, music, and video created by LMM at t

NotebookLM's is incredibly good at generating the affect and structure of a quality podcast. This is in-line with all art, music, and video created by LMM at the moment. They are imitating a structure and affect, the quality of the content is largely irrelevant. I think the interesting thing is that most people don't really care, and AI is not to blame for that. Most books published today have the affect of a book, but the author doesn't really have anything to say. Publishing a book is not about communicating ideas, but a means to something else. It's not meant to stand on its own. The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary.

peutetre 2y ago
But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance?
- jcims 2y ago
  I’ve probably bought ten books in the last five years that I’ve never read. I’ve heard at least one ad from dozens (probably a hundred) podcast episodes that I didn’t finish.
- timoth3y 2y ago
  In the case of those books and podcasts, who cares if you read or listen to them? The point is that the books are sold and make the right lists. The point is that the podcasts are downloaded so ads can be sold or that vanity numbers can be reported. In terms of such music and films (whether created by human or AI) sometimes it's just because we are social creatures and need shared experiences to talk with others about.
  - peutetre 2y ago
    But knowing it's synthetic, why would you buy the book or listen to the podcast in the first place? There's nothing social or shared in a synthetic affectation.
    - corysama 2y ago
      In an ideal world, I would sit down with an espresso or a beer, and review collections of research papers on a regular basis. In reality, between work, sleep and family, I rarely have anything resembling that kind of time and mental energy reserve available. But, what I can afford is to listen to podcasts while doing other things. Doing that gives me enough of an overview to keep up with a general topic and find new topics that might be worth investing into deeper. Wouldn’t it be great if someone made a podcast channel specifically for “Papers corysama wants to hear about at this moment”? I think so. Apparently, so do a lot of other people. But, they don’t want to list to my specific channel.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
  I wouldn't read an AI-generated book (except maybe once as a curiosity), but I would definitely listen to AI-generated music if it were good enough. Reading a book is a time investment so I want it to convey the thoughts of another human being, otherwise it would feel like wasting my time. Listening to music, on the other hand, often is something that I do while I exercise, to keep a brisk pace and not get bored. As long as it sounds good, fits the genres and styles I like and is upbeat enough for exercising, I wouldn't have much of a problem with AI music - maybe it would even be a plus, since there are some specific music genres where I have already listened to pretty much everything there is (and no more is being made), and it would be great to have more. I don't listen to podcasts, but I suppose in that case it depends on how you do so: devoting your full time and attention like a book, or as a background while you do something else like exercise music? As far as I know, many listeners are in the latter case, so I don't see why they wouldn't listen to AI podcasts.
  - djur 2y ago
    There's background sounds and there's music. Music can communicate as much as the written word. I've listened to algorithmically generated bloop-blops and it's fine for background sound, but if it can't touch my heart it's not really music to me.
    - lugu 2y ago
      To me, as soon as I know it was fully generated it looses it's magic. It doesn't matter how good it is. I see the same with potteries. A factory made pot cannot have more value than a hand made pot with the signature of a human. This touches the very fabric of society. Hard to explain.
  - MrScruff 2y ago
    I think it comes down to your area of interest. As a musician and music lover, I spend a significant amount of time trying to find or create music that is both original and good. AI generated music can be a competent imitation of well established ideas and forms, but that’s of zero value to me - I’m not looking for ‘more of the same’ - quite the opposite.
- JonathanFly 2y ago
  >But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance? A randomly selected NotebookLM podcast is probably not substantial enough on its own. But with human curation, a carefully prompted and cherry-picked NotebookLM podcast could be pretty good. Or without curation, I would use this on a long drive where audio was the only option to get a quick survey of a bunch of material.
- llmthrow102 2y ago
  That's the same question I have. There is already a ton of great podcasts/music/everything in the niches that I like that I don't have the time to listen to them all. I also like to have quiet introspective time. So where does AI regurgitated slop fit into my life?
  - dromtrund 2y ago
    In the case of NotebookLM, the AI generated podcasts aren't competing with existing podcasts, they're competing with other ways of consuming the source material. Would I rather listen to a real podcast? Yes. But no one's making a real podcast about the Bluetooth L2CAP specification.
    - LegitShady 2y ago
      All podcasts compete for peopled time and attention.
richardw 2y ago
I think and hope that you're wrong. There's always been cheese, and there's a lot of it now. But there is still a market for top-notch insight. For example, Perun. This guy delivers an hourlong presentation on (mostly) the Ukraine-Russia war and its pure quality. Insights, humour, excellent delivery, from what seems to be a military-focused economist/analyst/consultant. We're a while away from some bot taking this kind of thing over. https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU Or hardcore history. The robots will get there, but it's going to take a while. https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
- lynx23 2y ago
  Seriously, hardcore history? I dont even remember where I heard from him, but I think it was a Lex podcast. So I checked out hardcore history and was mightily disappointed. To my ears, he is rambling 3 hours about a topic, more or less unstructured and very long-winded, so that I basically remember nothing after having finished the podcast. I tried several times again, because I wanted it to be good. But no, not the format for me, and not a presentation I can actually absorb.
  - emsixteen 2y ago
    Don't worry, you're not alone. I can't remember what I didn't like about it, but I really wasn't a fan. Thankfully there's plenty out there I am a fan of!
  - phreeza 2y ago
    Yea there are much better examples of quality history podcasts, that are non-rambling. E.g. Mike Duncan podcasts (Revolutions, History of Rome), or the Age of Napoleon podcast. But even those are really just very good digestions of various source materials, which seems like something where LLMs will eventually reach quite a good level.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I thought this was a great, insightful comment, but noodling over it a little more made me think it's not just content producers who are responsible for this "quality vacuousness" epidemic. I think this is just partly an inevitable consequence of going from "content scarcity" to our new normal of "content obesity" over the past 20 years or so. In this new era of an overwhelming amount of content, it's just natural to compare it all against each other, e.g. to essentially "optimize" it to the "best" form, but in doing that we've fallen into a homogeneity, and the resulting lack of variation is an actual lowering of quality in and of itself. 2 examples to explain what I mean: 1. I find that nearly all interior design (at least within broad styles) looks basically the same to me now. It's all got that "minimalist, muted tones but with a touch of organic coziness and one or two pops of color" look to it. Honestly, I don't know how interior designers even exist today, when it's trivial to go to Houzz or any of a million websites and say "yes, like this". A while back I was complaining online somewhere that I thought all interior design looked similar where in the past there was much more interesting variation, and somebody insightful replied that it's not really that interior design is now just the same, it's that it's really just converged. People can easily see and compare a million designs against each other, so there is much less of a chance for that green shag carpet to even get a moment in the sun. 2. I was recently on vacation and decided I wanted to read a "classic" book, so I read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (I'm not sure why I never had to read that in high school). Nearly throughout the entire book I couldn't help but thinking "Is there any time this book stops sucking?" I hated the entire thing - it was like being forced to watch someone's vacation photos for twelve hours straight, and I kept wondering why there never seemed to be any attempt to actually make me give a shit about any of the characters in the book, as nearly every one of them I found insufferable and wondered how they each had about 3 or 4 livers to spare. But I do understand that Hemingway's writing style was unique and original at the time, and that he was doing something new and interesting that influenced American literature for a long time. But these days, given the flood of content, it feels like most attempts at doing something "new and interesting" are not only forced, but nearly impossible given that there are a million other people also trying to do new and interesting things that now have the means to disseminate them. I don't think a book like The Sun Also Rises, where I believe the main impact was the style of writing/dialogue vs the actual story, could ever break through today. I guess my point with this long post is that I think the "loss of quality" in content that many of us sense is just a direct result of there being so much content that we see variations from the "ideal" as worse, where in the past we may have found them interesting.
3abiton 2y ago
I ran one of my papers into it, mind blown how well they dumbed it down without losing too much details (still quite a lot was ommitted). I wonder if it's domain specific, and I wonder what's the variance by topic.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
  Same here. In fact, I typically struggle communicating my scientific research to journalists, and next time I'll use this. It found some good metaphors to make even a quite math-heavy paper's core concepts understandable to the audience without losing correctness, which is something that both I and the journalist typically fail to do (I keep the correctness but don't make it understandable enough, so then journalists start coming up with metaphors and do the opposite). A lawyer friend of mine also suggested giving it the Spanish civil code, a long, arid legal text. The podcast of course didn't cover the whole text in 10 minutes, which would be impossible, but they selected some interesting tidbits and actually had me hooked until the end and made me learn a few things about it, which is no small merit. And my friend was quite impressed and didn't complain about correctness.
- tkgally 2y ago
  I did the same thing, running one book I edited and another book I wrote through it, and it did quite well. I was particularly impressed with how the “hosts” came up with their own succinct examples and metaphors to explain what I had written at much greater length. (I should mention that one of those books was in Japanese, and they captured it clearly in English.) Lately, when I just want to get the gist of a long article or research paper, I run it through NotebookLM and listen to the podcast while I’m exercising. My only complaint is that the chatty podcasty gab gets tiring after a while. I wish it were possible to dial that down.
  - jp_nc 2y ago
    I dumped my kids weekly middle school update into it and it produced a nice summary that I could listen to while doing something else.
tossandthrow 2y ago
I think it is right that people don't care and there is some merit to it. Reading, or listening to podcast, these days is more akin to a meditation - many people do it to reenforce an identity rather than to expand on themselves. And I do think that is reasonable as, for many people, there are few other structures that can keep them in check with themselves.
deng 2y ago
I would disagree it's trying to be a "quality" podcast. As usual with AI, it's an average over averages, incredibly mediocre, sometimes borderline satire. For instance, in this example podcast they say "and trust me, guys, you wanna hear all about this", which is where I would usually turn off, because nothing of quality can come after this sentence. In my company, HR now uses AI to do training videos. It's hilariously funny, because it looks like a satire on training videos (well, granted, it's funny for a minute or two, then it shifts to annoying).
- jeremyjh 2y ago
  That's actually a really good application of AI, because the quality of the content is meaningless as long as it hits the bullet points. They only do this to check a box that training on <topic> was done.
- 12_throw_away 2y ago
  Right? The fact that the LLM output is indistinguishable from a podcast says more about podcasts than about LLMs. If anything, listening to that reminded me of why I stopped listening to podcasts in the first place - every 5 second snippet of something interesting ends up suffocated by 5 minutes of filler and dead air.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
emsign 2y ago
So your argument in anutshell is: humans have nothing to say, let's stop listening to them. Are you serious? It's ALL about what humans want to send out to the world, this is what it's all about. I'm perplexed that this isn't obvious.
robinsonb5 2y ago
The thing is, we have been here before. Think back to the mid-1980s and the first time everyone got their hands on a Casio or Yamaha keyboard with auto-accompaniment. It was a huge amount of fun to play with, just pressing a few buttons, playing a few notes and feeling like you were producing a "real" pop song. Meanwhile, any actual musicians were to be found crying in the corner of the room, not because a new tool had come along which threatened their position, but because non-musicians apparently didn't understand (at least immediately) the difference between these superficial, low-effort machine-generated sounds and actual music.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  That's a really good analogy.
- sirsinsalot 2y ago
  And yet Clint Eastwood by the Gorillaz was a Casio demo track. It isn't so black and white. https://youtube.com/shorts/Wn0NtSNeQEQ https://youtube.com/shorts/Wn0NtSNeQEQ
  - lugu 2y ago
    That is to the point. Gorillaz has talent, and that is what made Clint Eastwood a hit. Not the Yamaha.
  - _emacsomancer_ 2y ago
    Similarly, Under Mi Sleng Teng[1], but here too it required human musical talent. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleng_Teng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleng_Teng
  - jazzypants 2y ago
    To be clear, Dan the Automator added an additional drum track, an additional bass track, and a melodica track as well as numerous other sound effects. They didn't just loop the Casio demo track.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
tarsinge 2y ago
Remembering the 90s when I grew up really into alternative music I think what has changed is maybe public perception. AI back then would not have changed much because mainstream pop music was already accepted as generic derivative existing only to make money. Quality was already seen as secondary to be successful. But nowadays maybe due to social networks incentives instead of journalists curation only numbers seem to matter.
IanCal 2y ago
> the quality of the content is largely irrelevant. But the content here has been fed into it deliberately.
janoc 2y ago
Well, yes. Replace the various music and book publishing mills with LLMs for even more low quality drivel filling the marketplaces because now even the already low barrier of having to actually pay someone to produce it will be removed. That's definitely going to be an improvement. Not.
huijzer 2y ago
> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days. For example, most furniture pictures from the 60s and 70s are from upper middle class homes. If we listen music, we listen to Queen and not some local band from Alabama (not that I’m against such bands at all; they can make great music too).
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days. I agree with this of course, because generally nobody remembers the bad stuff unless it was the worst. I beg to differ with music, though, because there's an opposing effect: we tend to be left with the most marketed music, which was usually a cheap knockoff of something interesting going on at the time. The shitty commercial knockoff becomes the "classic" while the people they were ripping off don't even get a wikipedia page.
  - malignblade 2y ago
    You're raising a good point about how "best" is defined. If you ask most people, they are by definition more likely to connect with broadly disseminated cheap knock offs than they are with whatever 'legit' inventive underground creator, simply because they've heard the former and not the latter. Just a mental exercise: If you ask 1000 people if they prefer Knock Off or Original, and 900 say Knock Off, which one was better? If the answer is still Original, by what metric do we measure quality?
vishnugupta 2y ago
> Most books published today have the affect of a book, but the author doesn't really have anything to say This has been the case as far back as I began reading books which is about 30 years.
belter 2y ago
The same could be said of most technical blogs, they are just marketing content to sell a company service...Miss the old Internet...
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
Thank you for saying that, it was always a background task thought, but now that you put it in words. This. The churn shall burn..
LegitShady 2y ago
it is the perfect milquetoast personality. It's like don lemon but without the interesting bits of don lemon. It has no draw or interest. Podcasts are only somewhat about things. The most important part is that they're by people, and the people is what draws people in. These ai podcasts are not by people, and when you listen to more than one you start to see the patterns and void where a personality is.
bambax 2y ago
Yes, this is impressive, it has all the idiosyncrasies of podcasting, the pauses, turns of phrase, even the tones where we hear people putting things in quotes, etc. ... but it's also pointless. And it's likely different episodes on different topics will tend to sound very much alike; it's already the case here, I'm sure I heard another example where the two voices were the same. In less than a year we all have learned to recognize AI images with pretty good accuracy; text is more difficult, but podcasting seems easy in comparison.
dustingetz 2y ago
yes, podcasting is a goto market strategy. One reason there are so many VC podcasts is because it is how GPs (VCs who fundraise) reach LPs (the money that invests in venture funds).
alickz 2y ago
I think the average person is more interested in the output than in the process e.g. more people want to read The Shining than want to read about how The Shining was written
- grugagag 2y ago
  Id say most people skip the reading part and watch the movie instead.
lvl155 2y ago
We’ve become so great at articulation and delivery of empty ideas. To a point, I completely block out people like these in real life. This is an entire career for many.
- fhe 2y ago
  my first job out of college was at a big name management consulting firm... to riff on your point: yes, such is the entire career for many. and theirs aren't even such bad careers if one only considers money and prestige. two years there completely cured me of any illusion of positive correlation between prestige and intelligence. I used to wonder if the partners at the firm actually believed the bullshit they were spilling -- actually "delivering value" per consulting parlance. I get it that people do intellectually dishonest things just for the money... but the partners seemed to genuinely believe their chatgpt-esque text generation. In the end I figured it was a combination of self-selection (only the true believers stay for the years and make partner) and a psycho-hack where if you want to convince your client, you better believe it yourself first (only the true believers make good evangelists).
oddthink 2y ago
It goes way too far, IMHO. It ends up sounding like a smarmy Sunday-morning talk show conversation, with over-exaggerated affect and no content. So far I've just fed it technical papers, which may be part of the problem, but what I got back was, "Gosh, imagine if a recommender system really understood us? Wow, that would be fantastic, wouldn't it?"
- skapadia 2y ago
  While it's impressive, I agree that it tends to make over the top comments or reactions about everything. It could probably make a Keurig machine sound like a revolutionary coffee maker.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Already in the sample embedded by Simon. "Gosh", "wow", "like", "like", "like", "[wooooaaaawiiiing, woooooooaawiiiiiiing]", "Oh my god", "I was so, like...". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDdqq_9TzI&t=34s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDdqq_9TzI&t=34s [April Ludgate meets Tynnifer, Parks and Rec]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mistrial9 2y ago
> the interesting thing is that most people don't really care no one has gotten feedback from "most people" .. this is raw hyperbole
chefandy 2y ago
> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs. I see this sort of convenient resignation all the time in the tech crowd... "creative workers only can blame themselves for tech companies taking their income because their art just isn't any good anymore!" The poor quality "content" that's been proliferating recently has been created, largely, using the very tools that AI has built, or their immediate precursors. AI, for all its benefits, has only made that worse. If you're saying, in good faith, that most of the infomercials, televangelist programs, talk radio, celebrity autobiographies, self-help books, scandalous expose books, and health/exercise fad books etc etc etc that came out 50 years ago were made for no reason beyond advancing human knowledge, you're either too young to remember any media from before our current era and haven't looked beyond survivorship bias. Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off. If their work was that awful, companies wouldn't be clamoring to vacuum it up into their models to make more of it. Nearly all of the salable output from these models exists solely because it took a creative product someone made with the intention of selling it and it's using it to sell a simulacra. It's using nostalgia to deflect guilt for harpooning the livelihood of many people because it's just more convenient and profitable to empower mediocre "content creators" they use to justify doing it.
- Qworg 2y ago
  I'm confused about your point RE: infomercials et al - that's poor quality "content" that's been proliferating for, as you say, more than 50 years. Is that not the work of commercial creative workers? Did it not exist pre AI? There's an argument to scale, certainly, but the idea that "things were better in the past before these <<new technologies>> came out" is generally a suspect argument. To your broader point - new tools for creating creative work come out all the time. Did we suffer greatly at the loss of image compositors when Photoshop arrived? On the flip side, did digital art gut painting and sculpture? Isn't this just another tool for creative expression? Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating. I don't think the technology is taking that away.
lordnacho 2y ago
> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. I was thinking this kind of thing is the perfect way to generate sports commentary.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gaieges 2y ago
People care about being able to consume information in ways that works for them. I don't have time to read white papers (nor am I very good at it), but want to know what they consist of. I also want to take my dog for a walk which is hard to do while staring at a screen. This, and other tools like it are useful in achieving that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
globnomulous 2y ago
> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. They're vulnerable because people aren't random. Most of what we do can be modeled statistically and translated into patterns and tendencies. Given a sufficient number of parameters, just about anything we do can be digested by an autocompletion program that can then generate an output similar enough to the real thing to fool us.

peutetre 2y ago

But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance?

jcims 2y ago
I’ve probably bought ten books in the last five years that I’ve never read. I’ve heard at least one ad from dozens (probably a hundred) podcast episodes that I didn’t finish.
timoth3y 2y ago
In the case of those books and podcasts, who cares if you read or listen to them? The point is that the books are sold and make the right lists. The point is that the podcasts are downloaded so ads can be sold or that vanity numbers can be reported. In terms of such music and films (whether created by human or AI) sometimes it's just because we are social creatures and need shared experiences to talk with others about.
- peutetre 2y ago
  But knowing it's synthetic, why would you buy the book or listen to the podcast in the first place? There's nothing social or shared in a synthetic affectation.
  - corysama 2y ago
    In an ideal world, I would sit down with an espresso or a beer, and review collections of research papers on a regular basis. In reality, between work, sleep and family, I rarely have anything resembling that kind of time and mental energy reserve available. But, what I can afford is to listen to podcasts while doing other things. Doing that gives me enough of an overview to keep up with a general topic and find new topics that might be worth investing into deeper. Wouldn’t it be great if someone made a podcast channel specifically for “Papers corysama wants to hear about at this moment”? I think so. Apparently, so do a lot of other people. But, they don’t want to list to my specific channel.
Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
I wouldn't read an AI-generated book (except maybe once as a curiosity), but I would definitely listen to AI-generated music if it were good enough. Reading a book is a time investment so I want it to convey the thoughts of another human being, otherwise it would feel like wasting my time. Listening to music, on the other hand, often is something that I do while I exercise, to keep a brisk pace and not get bored. As long as it sounds good, fits the genres and styles I like and is upbeat enough for exercising, I wouldn't have much of a problem with AI music - maybe it would even be a plus, since there are some specific music genres where I have already listened to pretty much everything there is (and no more is being made), and it would be great to have more. I don't listen to podcasts, but I suppose in that case it depends on how you do so: devoting your full time and attention like a book, or as a background while you do something else like exercise music? As far as I know, many listeners are in the latter case, so I don't see why they wouldn't listen to AI podcasts.
- djur 2y ago
  There's background sounds and there's music. Music can communicate as much as the written word. I've listened to algorithmically generated bloop-blops and it's fine for background sound, but if it can't touch my heart it's not really music to me.
  - lugu 2y ago
    To me, as soon as I know it was fully generated it looses it's magic. It doesn't matter how good it is. I see the same with potteries. A factory made pot cannot have more value than a hand made pot with the signature of a human. This touches the very fabric of society. Hard to explain.
- MrScruff 2y ago
  I think it comes down to your area of interest. As a musician and music lover, I spend a significant amount of time trying to find or create music that is both original and good. AI generated music can be a competent imitation of well established ideas and forms, but that’s of zero value to me - I’m not looking for ‘more of the same’ - quite the opposite.
JonathanFly 2y ago
>But why would I buy those books or listen to those podcasts that are synthetic affectations of no substance? A randomly selected NotebookLM podcast is probably not substantial enough on its own. But with human curation, a carefully prompted and cherry-picked NotebookLM podcast could be pretty good. Or without curation, I would use this on a long drive where audio was the only option to get a quick survey of a bunch of material.
llmthrow102 2y ago
That's the same question I have. There is already a ton of great podcasts/music/everything in the niches that I like that I don't have the time to listen to them all. I also like to have quiet introspective time. So where does AI regurgitated slop fit into my life?
- dromtrund 2y ago
  In the case of NotebookLM, the AI generated podcasts aren't competing with existing podcasts, they're competing with other ways of consuming the source material. Would I rather listen to a real podcast? Yes. But no one's making a real podcast about the Bluetooth L2CAP specification.
  - LegitShady 2y ago
    All podcasts compete for peopled time and attention.

richardw 2y ago

I think and hope that you're wrong. There's always been cheese, and there's a lot of it now. But there is still a market for top-notch insight. For example, Perun. This guy delivers an hourlong presentation on (mostly) the Ukraine-Russia war and its pure quality. Insights, humour, excellent delivery, from what seems to be a military-focused economist/analyst/consultant. We're a while away from some bot taking this kind of thing over. https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU Or hardcore history. The robots will get there, but it's going to take a while. https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

lynx23 2y ago
Seriously, hardcore history? I dont even remember where I heard from him, but I think it was a Lex podcast. So I checked out hardcore history and was mightily disappointed. To my ears, he is rambling 3 hours about a topic, more or less unstructured and very long-winded, so that I basically remember nothing after having finished the podcast. I tried several times again, because I wanted it to be good. But no, not the format for me, and not a presentation I can actually absorb.
- emsixteen 2y ago
  Don't worry, you're not alone. I can't remember what I didn't like about it, but I really wasn't a fan. Thankfully there's plenty out there I am a fan of!
- phreeza 2y ago
  Yea there are much better examples of quality history podcasts, that are non-rambling. E.g. Mike Duncan podcasts (Revolutions, History of Rome), or the Age of Napoleon podcast. But even those are really just very good digestions of various source materials, which seems like something where LLMs will eventually reach quite a good level.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I thought this was a great, insightful comment, but noodling over it a little more made me think it's not just content producers who are responsible for this "quality vacuousness" epidemic. I think this is just partly an inevitable consequence of going from "content scarcity" to our new normal of "content obesity" over the past 20 years or so. In this new era of an overwhelming amount of content, it's just natural to compare it all against each other, e.g. to essentially "optimize" it to the "best" form, but in doing that we've fallen into a homogeneity, and the resulting lack of variation is an actual lowering of quality in and of itself. 2 examples to explain what I mean: 1. I find that nearly all interior design (at least within broad styles) looks basically the same to me now. It's all got that "minimalist, muted tones but with a touch of organic coziness and one or two pops of color" look to it. Honestly, I don't know how interior designers even exist today, when it's trivial to go to Houzz or any of a million websites and say "yes, like this". A while back I was complaining online somewhere that I thought all interior design looked similar where in the past there was much more interesting variation, and somebody insightful replied that it's not really that interior design is now just the same, it's that it's really just converged. People can easily see and compare a million designs against each other, so there is much less of a chance for that green shag carpet to even get a moment in the sun. 2. I was recently on vacation and decided I wanted to read a "classic" book, so I read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (I'm not sure why I never had to read that in high school). Nearly throughout the entire book I couldn't help but thinking "Is there any time this book stops sucking?" I hated the entire thing - it was like being forced to watch someone's vacation photos for twelve hours straight, and I kept wondering why there never seemed to be any attempt to actually make me give a shit about any of the characters in the book, as nearly every one of them I found insufferable and wondered how they each had about 3 or 4 livers to spare. But I do understand that Hemingway's writing style was unique and original at the time, and that he was doing something new and interesting that influenced American literature for a long time. But these days, given the flood of content, it feels like most attempts at doing something "new and interesting" are not only forced, but nearly impossible given that there are a million other people also trying to do new and interesting things that now have the means to disseminate them. I don't think a book like The Sun Also Rises, where I believe the main impact was the style of writing/dialogue vs the actual story, could ever break through today. I guess my point with this long post is that I think the "loss of quality" in content that many of us sense is just a direct result of there being so much content that we see variations from the "ideal" as worse, where in the past we may have found them interesting.

3abiton 2y ago

I ran one of my papers into it, mind blown how well they dumbed it down without losing too much details (still quite a lot was ommitted). I wonder if it's domain specific, and I wonder what's the variance by topic.

Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
Same here. In fact, I typically struggle communicating my scientific research to journalists, and next time I'll use this. It found some good metaphors to make even a quite math-heavy paper's core concepts understandable to the audience without losing correctness, which is something that both I and the journalist typically fail to do (I keep the correctness but don't make it understandable enough, so then journalists start coming up with metaphors and do the opposite). A lawyer friend of mine also suggested giving it the Spanish civil code, a long, arid legal text. The podcast of course didn't cover the whole text in 10 minutes, which would be impossible, but they selected some interesting tidbits and actually had me hooked until the end and made me learn a few things about it, which is no small merit. And my friend was quite impressed and didn't complain about correctness.
tkgally 2y ago
I did the same thing, running one book I edited and another book I wrote through it, and it did quite well. I was particularly impressed with how the “hosts” came up with their own succinct examples and metaphors to explain what I had written at much greater length. (I should mention that one of those books was in Japanese, and they captured it clearly in English.) Lately, when I just want to get the gist of a long article or research paper, I run it through NotebookLM and listen to the podcast while I’m exercising. My only complaint is that the chatty podcasty gab gets tiring after a while. I wish it were possible to dial that down.
- jp_nc 2y ago
  I dumped my kids weekly middle school update into it and it produced a nice summary that I could listen to while doing something else.

tossandthrow 2y ago

I think it is right that people don't care and there is some merit to it. Reading, or listening to podcast, these days is more akin to a meditation - many people do it to reenforce an identity rather than to expand on themselves. And I do think that is reasonable as, for many people, there are few other structures that can keep them in check with themselves.

deng 2y ago

I would disagree it's trying to be a "quality" podcast. As usual with AI, it's an average over averages, incredibly mediocre, sometimes borderline satire. For instance, in this example podcast they say "and trust me, guys, you wanna hear all about this", which is where I would usually turn off, because nothing of quality can come after this sentence. In my company, HR now uses AI to do training videos. It's hilariously funny, because it looks like a satire on training videos (well, granted, it's funny for a minute or two, then it shifts to annoying).

jeremyjh 2y ago
That's actually a really good application of AI, because the quality of the content is meaningless as long as it hits the bullet points. They only do this to check a box that training on <topic> was done.
12_throw_away 2y ago
Right? The fact that the LLM output is indistinguishable from a podcast says more about podcasts than about LLMs. If anything, listening to that reminded me of why I stopped listening to podcasts in the first place - every 5 second snippet of something interesting ends up suffocated by 5 minutes of filler and dead air.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

emsign 2y ago

So your argument in anutshell is: humans have nothing to say, let's stop listening to them. Are you serious? It's ALL about what humans want to send out to the world, this is what it's all about. I'm perplexed that this isn't obvious.

robinsonb5 2y ago

The thing is, we have been here before. Think back to the mid-1980s and the first time everyone got their hands on a Casio or Yamaha keyboard with auto-accompaniment. It was a huge amount of fun to play with, just pressing a few buttons, playing a few notes and feeling like you were producing a "real" pop song. Meanwhile, any actual musicians were to be found crying in the corner of the room, not because a new tool had come along which threatened their position, but because non-musicians apparently didn't understand (at least immediately) the difference between these superficial, low-effort machine-generated sounds and actual music.

HPsquared 2y ago
That's a really good analogy.
sirsinsalot 2y ago
And yet Clint Eastwood by the Gorillaz was a Casio demo track. It isn't so black and white. https://youtube.com/shorts/Wn0NtSNeQEQ https://youtube.com/shorts/Wn0NtSNeQEQ
- lugu 2y ago
  That is to the point. Gorillaz has talent, and that is what made Clint Eastwood a hit. Not the Yamaha.
- _emacsomancer_ 2y ago
  Similarly, Under Mi Sleng Teng[1], but here too it required human musical talent. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleng_Teng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleng_Teng
- jazzypants 2y ago
  To be clear, Dan the Automator added an additional drum track, an additional bass track, and a melodica track as well as numerous other sound effects. They didn't just loop the Casio demo track.
Workaccount2 2y ago

tarsinge 2y ago

Remembering the 90s when I grew up really into alternative music I think what has changed is maybe public perception. AI back then would not have changed much because mainstream pop music was already accepted as generic derivative existing only to make money. Quality was already seen as secondary to be successful. But nowadays maybe due to social networks incentives instead of journalists curation only numbers seem to matter.

IanCal 2y ago

> the quality of the content is largely irrelevant. But the content here has been fed into it deliberately.

janoc 2y ago

Well, yes. Replace the various music and book publishing mills with LLMs for even more low quality drivel filling the marketplaces because now even the already low barrier of having to actually pay someone to produce it will be removed. That's definitely going to be an improvement. Not.

huijzer 2y ago

> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days. For example, most furniture pictures from the 60s and 70s are from upper middle class homes. If we listen music, we listen to Queen and not some local band from Alabama (not that I’m against such bands at all; they can make great music too).

pessimizer 2y ago
> I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days. I agree with this of course, because generally nobody remembers the bad stuff unless it was the worst. I beg to differ with music, though, because there's an opposing effect: we tend to be left with the most marketed music, which was usually a cheap knockoff of something interesting going on at the time. The shitty commercial knockoff becomes the "classic" while the people they were ripping off don't even get a wikipedia page.
- malignblade 2y ago
  You're raising a good point about how "best" is defined. If you ask most people, they are by definition more likely to connect with broadly disseminated cheap knock offs than they are with whatever 'legit' inventive underground creator, simply because they've heard the former and not the latter. Just a mental exercise: If you ask 1000 people if they prefer Knock Off or Original, and 900 say Knock Off, which one was better? If the answer is still Original, by what metric do we measure quality?

vishnugupta 2y ago

> Most books published today have the affect of a book, but the author doesn't really have anything to say This has been the case as far back as I began reading books which is about 30 years.

belter 2y ago

The same could be said of most technical blogs, they are just marketing content to sell a company service...Miss the old Internet...

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

Thank you for saying that, it was always a background task thought, but now that you put it in words. This. The churn shall burn..

LegitShady 2y ago

it is the perfect milquetoast personality. It's like don lemon but without the interesting bits of don lemon. It has no draw or interest. Podcasts are only somewhat about things. The most important part is that they're by people, and the people is what draws people in. These ai podcasts are not by people, and when you listen to more than one you start to see the patterns and void where a personality is.

bambax 2y ago

Yes, this is impressive, it has all the idiosyncrasies of podcasting, the pauses, turns of phrase, even the tones where we hear people putting things in quotes, etc. ... but it's also pointless. And it's likely different episodes on different topics will tend to sound very much alike; it's already the case here, I'm sure I heard another example where the two voices were the same. In less than a year we all have learned to recognize AI images with pretty good accuracy; text is more difficult, but podcasting seems easy in comparison.

dustingetz 2y ago

yes, podcasting is a goto market strategy. One reason there are so many VC podcasts is because it is how GPs (VCs who fundraise) reach LPs (the money that invests in venture funds).

alickz 2y ago

I think the average person is more interested in the output than in the process e.g. more people want to read The Shining than want to read about how The Shining was written

grugagag 2y ago
Id say most people skip the reading part and watch the movie instead.

lvl155 2y ago

We’ve become so great at articulation and delivery of empty ideas. To a point, I completely block out people like these in real life. This is an entire career for many.

fhe 2y ago
my first job out of college was at a big name management consulting firm... to riff on your point: yes, such is the entire career for many. and theirs aren't even such bad careers if one only considers money and prestige. two years there completely cured me of any illusion of positive correlation between prestige and intelligence. I used to wonder if the partners at the firm actually believed the bullshit they were spilling -- actually "delivering value" per consulting parlance. I get it that people do intellectually dishonest things just for the money... but the partners seemed to genuinely believe their chatgpt-esque text generation. In the end I figured it was a combination of self-selection (only the true believers stay for the years and make partner) and a psycho-hack where if you want to convince your client, you better believe it yourself first (only the true believers make good evangelists).

oddthink 2y ago

It goes way too far, IMHO. It ends up sounding like a smarmy Sunday-morning talk show conversation, with over-exaggerated affect and no content. So far I've just fed it technical papers, which may be part of the problem, but what I got back was, "Gosh, imagine if a recommender system really understood us? Wow, that would be fantastic, wouldn't it?"

skapadia 2y ago
While it's impressive, I agree that it tends to make over the top comments or reactions about everything. It could probably make a Keurig machine sound like a revolutionary coffee maker.
mdp2021 2y ago
Already in the sample embedded by Simon. "Gosh", "wow", "like", "like", "like", "[wooooaaaawiiiing, woooooooaawiiiiiiing]", "Oh my god", "I was so, like...". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDdqq_9TzI&t=34s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDdqq_9TzI&t=34s [April Ludgate meets Tynnifer, Parks and Rec]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mistrial9 2y ago

> the interesting thing is that most people don't really care no one has gotten feedback from "most people" .. this is raw hyperbole

chefandy 2y ago

> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. Commercial creative workers are vulnerable because there's a billions-of-dollars industry effort to copy their professional output and compete with them selling cheap knock-offs. I see this sort of convenient resignation all the time in the tech crowd... "creative workers only can blame themselves for tech companies taking their income because their art just isn't any good anymore!" The poor quality "content" that's been proliferating recently has been created, largely, using the very tools that AI has built, or their immediate precursors. AI, for all its benefits, has only made that worse. If you're saying, in good faith, that most of the infomercials, televangelist programs, talk radio, celebrity autobiographies, self-help books, scandalous expose books, and health/exercise fad books etc etc etc that came out 50 years ago were made for no reason beyond advancing human knowledge, you're either too young to remember any media from before our current era and haven't looked beyond survivorship bias. Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off. If their work was that awful, companies wouldn't be clamoring to vacuum it up into their models to make more of it. Nearly all of the salable output from these models exists solely because it took a creative product someone made with the intention of selling it and it's using it to sell a simulacra. It's using nostalgia to deflect guilt for harpooning the livelihood of many people because it's just more convenient and profitable to empower mediocre "content creators" they use to justify doing it.

Qworg 2y ago
I'm confused about your point RE: infomercials et al - that's poor quality "content" that's been proliferating for, as you say, more than 50 years. Is that not the work of commercial creative workers? Did it not exist pre AI? There's an argument to scale, certainly, but the idea that "things were better in the past before these <<new technologies>> came out" is generally a suspect argument. To your broader point - new tools for creating creative work come out all the time. Did we suffer greatly at the loss of image compositors when Photoshop arrived? On the flip side, did digital art gut painting and sculpture? Isn't this just another tool for creative expression? Art is a way of seeing, not a way of creating. I don't think the technology is taking that away.

lordnacho 2y ago

> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. I was thinking this kind of thing is the perfect way to generate sports commentary.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gaieges 2y ago

People care about being able to consume information in ways that works for them. I don't have time to read white papers (nor am I very good at it), but want to know what they consist of. I also want to take my dog for a walk which is hard to do while staring at a screen. This, and other tools like it are useful in achieving that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

globnomulous 2y ago

> The reason so much writing, podcasting, and music is vulnerable to AI disruption is that quality has already become secondary. They're vulnerable because people aren't random. Most of what we do can be modeled statistically and translated into patterns and tendencies. Given a sufficient number of parameters, just about anything we do can be digested by an autocompletion program that can then generate an output similar enough to the real thing to fool us.