AI Me! (with NotebookLM)

Anyone remember Super Size Me? In 2004, Morgan Spurlock, an independent documentary filmmaker went on an all-McDonald's diet for a month and filmed the experience, including the decline in his physical and mental well-being (Spurlock actually passed away from complications of cancer earlier this year; largely unrelated to his McDonald's experiment I hope). The movie highlighted the deleterious health effects of "fast food", won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and became the 7th-highest grossing documentary feature of all time.

Fast-forward twenty years and concerns about obesity (there's a cure!) and the food industry have been eclipsed by concerns about artificial intelligence: AI. Numerous opinion pieces, TED talks and corporate dramas have unfolded over whether this technology, which at best aids human understanding and at its worst (we're told) proposes to substitute or misguide it, is a boon or a threat. Fortunes have been made (full disclosure: I've never traded Nvidia's stock) even as it remains unclear whether AI can, after all the hype, meaningfully help businesses or people or communities.

Through all of this, I've been watching half-bemused and half-bewildered from the sidelines. Few folks would now guess that I earned my Masters in Computer Science (back in, gasp! 1986) with a thesis describing the development and performance of an "expert system" designed to help with the diagnosis of lower back pain. Back then, expert systems were a form of AI. That's laughable today, since they were static code. In 1986 neural-net-enabled machine learning was a barely on the drawing board and Nvidia wouldn't be founded for another 7 years. Call me an AI skeptic. After all, if it's artificial, it ain't the real thing, right?

But just yesterday I got a text from my friend Ed Chung, who, as a Brooklynite, and 10 years my junior, is much closer to the digital buzz than I am. Ed and his posse recently released a fanzine for some board games they've been developing and marketing through their venture Ampersand RPG.

Just for kicks, they fed a PDF file promoting the fanzine to a tool called NotebookLM, a Google product that promises to be a "digital research assistant" which can synthesize text files, images, websites... more or less anything digital you throw at it. The kicker is that, in addition to the option of representing all that information in a structured text format, NotebookLM can also generate a conversation (between two artificial radio hosts, male and female, as it were) which aims at highlighting many of the key points of the material fed it. The effect is that of a podcast that chattily summarizes what you've put in.

Mind-bending stuff. Ampersand's fanzine PDF generated this 8-minute recording.

Quibble with the fact that it runs on a little too long or that the voices are, to European, Latinx, Asian, or, perhaps especially to British ears, gratingly American. Length can be chopped and the intonations are, of course, a choice: intended to give the exchange the casual flavor that Google's developers thought the majority of their users would happily relate to. No doubt properly-accented British English or refreshingly laid-back Aussie versions of these "speakers", not to mention voices speaking any human language, could be coded. Fact is, the output is freakishly real-sounding, convincingly rendered as a spontaneous, unscripted exchange between two commentators and spot-on as a cursory review of the source material.

Intrigued, I pointed NotebookLM to our website and clicked "Generate". The result was unsettling. Two synthesized but very human-sounding voices started talking about Poggiosole as if they had been asked to review it, as if they were considering coming to stay as guests. Sure, they'd have a hard time getting on a plane, they couldn't pronounce the property's name correctly (even with considerable coaching from me), and the first recording "they" made leaned a little heavily on wine tasting while saying nothing about Poggiosole's olive groves or olive oil or, well, about me. 😜

But those are all notions any first-time visitor to our website might come away with, and I soon learned that one could type up a paragraph or two of additional info and suggestions to "adjust" NotebookLM's reading of the data. Which I did. And with just

those two sources, and a few more attempts to correct how the voices in the recording pronounced "Poggiosole" (still not quite right), I got THIS. Which, frankly, if it were broadcast as a five-minute segment of a popular travel podcast or radio program, would likely make our bookings explode overnight and forever.

Immediately, my imagination went into overdrive. Clearly the software is designed to "run with" the mood and purpose of the source material. I fed it a promotional website and got a conversation promoting our property. But what if future versions included settings that could have the algo look at the source material more critically? Make digs at it, discredit it, tear it apart even? A scary thought, especially if the domain of the discussion were a shade more consequential than where to book your Tuscan getaway.

But what really got me was listening to these two disembodied voices talking convincingly about "all the digital overload we face", the "basic human need to unplug", "this growing desire for genuine experiences" and "a real connection ... to nature, to ourselves" (all in 20 seconds from min 0:57), and then, towards the end of the recording, after talking about picnics, "olive groves whispering secrets in the wind" and high-phenolic evoo, bring their "discussion" back to those existential themes. It's not just a collection of sound bites. There's a flow to the conversation that gives the listener a sense of intelligence beyond the banter.

And insight: touching on me as Poggiosole's owner and host at minute 2:00: "it's not just a business for him ... it's a way of life." Huh? Happens to be true but how in heck do Dick and Jane Bot-brain presume to know that? Nowhere in our website's pages (there's no evidence that NotebookLM read the blog) do I write that Poggiosole is a way of life for me. But it has become central to my way of life.

In their closing exchange, guy-voice says he's "feeling a sense of calm" and gal-voice asks "What parts of Poggiosole really speak to you?" (from min 4:24). Venturing into the philosophical, guy-voice concludes by pondering "What creates the soul of a place? Is it the people? The history? The energy of the land itself?" thereby evoking Descartes' mind-body dualism. Can an entity without a body, without any direct or physical experience of the world, credibly pose such questions?

Let's lighten up. I sent the recording to my 22-year-old son Elio, and he predictably found it hilarious...

And also hugely impressive. When I got back to Ed with what NotebookLM did with Poggiosole's site, he was astounded too: "Remember the episode of STNG where they found a 20th century pulp novel and Riker hands it over to Data and says 'Summarize please' and Data fans through it and gives a one-sentence synopsis? We are there." Ed's not off by much, and I'm still shaking my head as I type this. Quoting Geoffrey Hinton, whose pioneering work with John Hopfield in backpropagation almost 50 years ago laid the foundations for modern neural networks (and earned each scientist a Nobel Prize in Physics earlier this month), AI "will be comparable with the Industrial Revolution. Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us.”