This Is NOT a Podcast! Google’s NotebookLM Podcast Generation Feature Is WILD

Listen to this post

Google’s NotebookLM is an AI-powered tool designed to help with note-taking, research, and organizing information. It pulls from the documents you upload to create summaries, answer questions, and generate creative ideas based on your notes. Useful enough, but they just added this crazy new podcast generation feature.

Generating my first podcast was too freaky!

This morning I decided to give the NotebookLM podcast feature a go by uploading some old notes from my stand-up comedy days. The result? A man and a woman who are way too into it, overthinking every joke and acting like they’re my biggest fans. It was hilarious, but also made me feel very uncomfortable… They sounded like they were groveling, like they knew I’d be listening. Weird.

They analyzed each joke as if it was some deep philosophical statement. They’d say things like, “That’s classic Chris right there!” as if they’d spent years studying my material. It felt like two deranged superfans who just didn’t know where to stop. If these people were real, I’d probably be scared and want nothing to do with them. Here’s a clip

A better use case for the AI generated podcast

After I recovered from that experience, I decided to give it another shot, this time using notes from a Google Chrome plugin I’m working on. It’s designed to help generate notes while browsing, so I figured it’d be interesting to see how the podcast feature handled something more serious.

The result? It was actually pretty informative, but the voices had this weird ditzy tone. They’d go from, “Oh, tell me about that, I don’t really know,” to suddenly acting like they were AI experts. It was a bit strange, but maybe it’s something that just takes some getting used to.

So, what better way to finish it than by making a podcast of this very article? Here it is. Pretty meta, huh?