Everyone started talking about Google’s NotebookLM because of their recent podcast update, but the real story is about how Google is using its AI experiments to push our understanding about how people will use generative AI as tools for thought.
I found some time to play around with the NotebookLM feature last night and I was pretty astounded by where this is heading—worried and curious and intrigued and all sorts of other things. This is the first time since playing with ChatGPT a couple years ago where I'm this unsettled.
(I uploaded some of my own writings, including an old fiction manuscript from a decade ago, and it was surreal to instantly have "commentary" discussing it, finding connections, identifying key moments, etc.)
I agree. As someone who has followed most of the incremental updates and various improvements to AI tools, the creation of audio "podcasts" of PDF documents (or websites - I plugged in a link to one of the programs at our school and it gave an incredibly useful overview) was the first time in a while where I had a genuine "you've got to be kidding me" moment. I shared this with many of my colleagues who are way behind on the AI front (something I find is happening all over the place) and to say they were astounded is an understatement. As with so many tech developments, what actually becomes useful with genAI is likely to be quite different than what we might have expected based solely on ChatGPT and chatbots. Thanks for bringing these tools to our attention, Marc. I just don't have the time to keep abreast of everything anymore and I count on folks like you to let us know the latest.
I really appreciate these explorations because, TBH, I don't have the interest or drive to do this level of exploring on my own. Some of it is what you say at the end, that I feel a kind of fatigue at the pace and volume of the releases and I'm happy to let someone else figure this out and I'll come and make of it what I will, later.
But also, I think there's some underexplored facets here in terms of whether or not access to "more" is necessarily better. On the one hand, I have literally millions of words of my own writing on education I could imagine loading into a system like this and making sure I'm able to touch base with all of it, but I also experience my own work as a process of filtering over time, so stuff that's 10-12 years old informs whatever I'm doing now, but I don't need to go back to the source material. Maybe I'm rationalizing because I'm lazy, but I don't recognize what that tool could allow me to do as something that's useful for me. Emphasis on "for me," I suppose, but it makes me think that one of the key things we can do for students is to really help them understand their own process and goals around writing. Lately I've been thinking that to help students navigate the changing world, we need to give them as much freedom as possible to see what they make with the tools available and then (through reflection) help them understand what's useful to them and why.
It's also interesting to consider a world where I wouldn't miss out on writing or sources that could be useful to me because I have this tool that helps me survey more stuff (or maybe even all the stuff). Almost daily I come across something that I could have (or even should have) known about to possibly integrate into my book, but now it's too late.
But what if limits around what's available or accessible are actually integral to the process? The goal isn't to write THE book, it's to write MY book. My book is defined by what I read, what I think, what I write. Of course it will be incomplete. That's what makes it interesting. It's part of a broader conversation, not a final verdict on a topic. I wonder what happens if we begin to believe that we have to comb the entire corpus of a subject before we express our own POV's.
I like giving students the freedom to explore and they've honestly surprised me with some of things they've talked about. I gave my students NotebookLM as a tool to explore this past week and many did not like the summaries and felt like they would get more out of reading an article. That said, others started going hog wild and uploading their class notes to it. One said she used it to generate several podcasts of her notes and listened to them while cooking dinner and folding laundry and enjoyed it!
Generative AI tools that have so many different utilities are like clay--you can shape and mold it into anything your imagine. We just haven't had any reasonable time to process any of these tools or use cases like we would in traditional settings and that creates a chaos that isn't likely to change anytime soon. I tell my students to balance their curiosity with these new tools with a healthy dose of skepticism.
The exploring frame is useful, I think, because I honestly don't know what I'm supposed to "teach" them about this stuff. How to use a specific program doesn't make sense since it all changes constantly. We clearly don't need instruction on prompt engineering since GPT-.01 now does that natively.
I think letting students try to discover what use it might have for their goals is the best we can do. Looking at it optimistically, it may force us into giving students more, rather than less, freedom in how they pursue their learning. That's something I can keep up with because I have a system of values I can apply to the activities.
I want to learn how I can convince the experts (and/or the CHATBOX memory banks) that the past pseudo science of macroeconomics has now been converted into a true science. And further that I will gladly share this knowledge for free, which comprises my research and discoveries about it with anybody who is seriously concerned. ASk for my e-book chestdher@gmail.com
I found some time to play around with the NotebookLM feature last night and I was pretty astounded by where this is heading—worried and curious and intrigued and all sorts of other things. This is the first time since playing with ChatGPT a couple years ago where I'm this unsettled.
(I uploaded some of my own writings, including an old fiction manuscript from a decade ago, and it was surreal to instantly have "commentary" discussing it, finding connections, identifying key moments, etc.)
I agree. As someone who has followed most of the incremental updates and various improvements to AI tools, the creation of audio "podcasts" of PDF documents (or websites - I plugged in a link to one of the programs at our school and it gave an incredibly useful overview) was the first time in a while where I had a genuine "you've got to be kidding me" moment. I shared this with many of my colleagues who are way behind on the AI front (something I find is happening all over the place) and to say they were astounded is an understatement. As with so many tech developments, what actually becomes useful with genAI is likely to be quite different than what we might have expected based solely on ChatGPT and chatbots. Thanks for bringing these tools to our attention, Marc. I just don't have the time to keep abreast of everything anymore and I count on folks like you to let us know the latest.
I really appreciate these explorations because, TBH, I don't have the interest or drive to do this level of exploring on my own. Some of it is what you say at the end, that I feel a kind of fatigue at the pace and volume of the releases and I'm happy to let someone else figure this out and I'll come and make of it what I will, later.
But also, I think there's some underexplored facets here in terms of whether or not access to "more" is necessarily better. On the one hand, I have literally millions of words of my own writing on education I could imagine loading into a system like this and making sure I'm able to touch base with all of it, but I also experience my own work as a process of filtering over time, so stuff that's 10-12 years old informs whatever I'm doing now, but I don't need to go back to the source material. Maybe I'm rationalizing because I'm lazy, but I don't recognize what that tool could allow me to do as something that's useful for me. Emphasis on "for me," I suppose, but it makes me think that one of the key things we can do for students is to really help them understand their own process and goals around writing. Lately I've been thinking that to help students navigate the changing world, we need to give them as much freedom as possible to see what they make with the tools available and then (through reflection) help them understand what's useful to them and why.
It's also interesting to consider a world where I wouldn't miss out on writing or sources that could be useful to me because I have this tool that helps me survey more stuff (or maybe even all the stuff). Almost daily I come across something that I could have (or even should have) known about to possibly integrate into my book, but now it's too late.
But what if limits around what's available or accessible are actually integral to the process? The goal isn't to write THE book, it's to write MY book. My book is defined by what I read, what I think, what I write. Of course it will be incomplete. That's what makes it interesting. It's part of a broader conversation, not a final verdict on a topic. I wonder what happens if we begin to believe that we have to comb the entire corpus of a subject before we express our own POV's.
Another indispensable post. Thanks.
I like giving students the freedom to explore and they've honestly surprised me with some of things they've talked about. I gave my students NotebookLM as a tool to explore this past week and many did not like the summaries and felt like they would get more out of reading an article. That said, others started going hog wild and uploading their class notes to it. One said she used it to generate several podcasts of her notes and listened to them while cooking dinner and folding laundry and enjoyed it!
Generative AI tools that have so many different utilities are like clay--you can shape and mold it into anything your imagine. We just haven't had any reasonable time to process any of these tools or use cases like we would in traditional settings and that creates a chaos that isn't likely to change anytime soon. I tell my students to balance their curiosity with these new tools with a healthy dose of skepticism.
The exploring frame is useful, I think, because I honestly don't know what I'm supposed to "teach" them about this stuff. How to use a specific program doesn't make sense since it all changes constantly. We clearly don't need instruction on prompt engineering since GPT-.01 now does that natively.
I think letting students try to discover what use it might have for their goals is the best we can do. Looking at it optimistically, it may force us into giving students more, rather than less, freedom in how they pursue their learning. That's something I can keep up with because I have a system of values I can apply to the activities.
I want to learn how I can convince the experts (and/or the CHATBOX memory banks) that the past pseudo science of macroeconomics has now been converted into a true science. And further that I will gladly share this knowledge for free, which comprises my research and discoveries about it with anybody who is seriously concerned. ASk for my e-book chestdher@gmail.com