A Podcastin' We Will Go
Have you heard of NotebookLM?
I'm hoping for your sake that the answer is "Duh, of course".
If not, and if this is the first time that you are hearing of it, then my sincere advice to you is to get cracking on reading as much as you can about AI in general, LLMs in particular, and about NotebookLM in particular. You simply cannot afford to remain unaware of all of these things, and your level of both awareness and familiarity with NotebookLM is a good proxy for how up to date you are with developments in this field.
So what can NotebookLM do?
I will be spending the month of May in Manipal, as I mentioned the other day, reveling in the learning that goes on in a Genwise Summer Camp. There are ten subjects that are on offer at the camp this year, ranging from a course on storytelling to a course on building out your own submarine.
How to go about creating a note-taking system that will allow us to share updates with parents about what happened in a day's worth of teaching in each course? How to make these updates fun, short, sharp, informative and easy to digest - and have all of these things happen as quickly as possible?
We decided to "record" a podcast, and you can listen to it here:
This is, just in case it wasn't clear already, an AI generated podcast. The teaching assistants used a simple shared folder on my GDrive account to upload notes that they took during the day...
... using a simple template...
... which I collated into a single file, and uploaded to NotebookLM, and told it to generate a podcast...
I then used AI Studio to generate a transcript...
... and finally, used the o3 model by OpenAI to edit the YouTube description etc.
The point of all this isn't to say that this is the only way, or even the best way, to get this done. Developments in AI are so rapid that there is a very good chance that all of what you read over here became gloriously outdated the day after I wrote the post, and I'm quite serious. The point is that recording a podcast, generating a transcript, designing the logos, and the background images for the video etc., would have taken a lot more time, and a lot more money in a non-AI world. All of these, save for the recording of the podcast, are tasks that I would have likely outsourced, and at considerable expense.
But today, it takes hardly any time, and hardly any money.
Do it!
For folks of my age (and I'm in my early 40's, alas), the problem with AI isn't so much the fact that we are not able to figure out what all it can do. It is, rather, the fact that our habits and workflows are far too ingrained in us. Our default choice, when we think of doing something, is to reach for a workflow that does not involve AI. Not because we object to using AI, or think it isn't good enough - although there are of course those of my age who do - but rather because it simply hasn't yet become a habit, or the default.
Now, on balance that may well be a good thing. But at the margin, it makes sense for us to step back and ask if we could (and should) use an LLM.
Because if we take less than a day to come up with a podcast, including all the paraphernalia that goes with it... what else can we unlock, make more efficient, or create that simply didn't exist before?
What else can we unlock, make more efficient, or create that simply didn't exist before?
... is both a question that we at the Summer Camp are thinking about, and is a question that we hope to ingrain into the minds of our students. And these students have quite a challenge in front of them in the years to come:
I also think that there’s some chance that the worst age to be is maybe 10 or so, because you are now computer literate, you’re sophisticated. You’re going into an education system that is needing to react to this technology. You will be using the technology in a way completely different to your education system, and it might just feel violently confusing. I see that being a really difficult time.
All of us in education need to think long and hard about how to make learning for kids not quite as violently confusing as it is right now.