Only a few days ago I learned about a magical new piece of technology. Google’s NotebookLM - a fabulously useful bit of kit in its own right - gave users the ability to generate not just an audio summary, but an entertaining podcast conversation.
I guess, in essence, it is just another piece of AI looking at human creativity.
I know some people will dial their interest right down to zero because of that.
No criticism from me. If that’s your faith, your belief, your dogma, I will not question your view.
AI involves some pretty deep and important spiritual questions about life, souls, emotion, and the creative essence, especially when we are talking about people who are good at making thoughtful beauty out of words.
As a balance, we have the view that technology can profoundly affect the quality of our existence.
All the tools available to medical science nowadays, for example. Weather satellites. The ability to connect to a network of people around the world in realtime.
These are immense strides. In the old days, tropical storms came out of nowhere and killed vast numbers of unprepared people while causing immense damage. People died in their millions from diseases that are now seen as extinct. If you wanted to communicate with someone in another country, your choices boiled down to a letter that might take weeks to arrive or a phone call that was super-expensive and sounded like the other end was howling through a hurricane.
I think, as human beings, we have to look at the benefits and set religious or spiritual dogma as a “nice to have”.
On that note - and I could go on for quite some time - let’s look at Google NotebookLM’s latest feature.
Indistinguishable from magic
It manifests as a podcast: a conversation between two people, sounding like natural human speech with pauses, sighs, interjections, changes in tone and rhythm, casual language. Even laughter. In short, everything that AI has not been up until now.
More usefully, it is presented as speech. We don’t have to read it, just listen. While we drive or chop vegetables or work out at the gym. Speech operates more directly on the mind. The message is experienced more directly. We only learned to read and write within the span of history but we have been talking to each other for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years.
It is how we destroyed the Neanderthals the second time we walked out of Africa into Europe. We could tell each other stories, not just about battleplans and weapons, but about how we were a larger community than a bunch of village-sized units.
We could share information, culture, and philosophy across continents. We could talk about sun-gods, ways of preparing food, how to make a better hunting tool, when and where the best food could be found. Our species could be a bigger thing than any group of a hundred Neanderthals. Or any other life form.
Listen to the audio. The “podcast team” are reviewing a story I wrote last year and was fortunate enough to have published in a stunningly creative anthology of speculative fiction.
I warn of the dangers of technology that seems too good to be true, and Google NotebookLM picks up on the implications.
Which, when you think about it, is pretty rich for something that is pure technology.
You might be thinking “uncanny valley” right now. Speech that isn’t quite right. A bit robotic, some odd word choices, a “dot-point mentality”, something not quite right about the pitch or the cadence.
Listen for yourself. There’s none of that. Some repeated phrases or word constructions; just like human beings.
If I didn’t know this was AI, I’d swear it was a couple of clever, articulate, emotionally adept people having a conversation.
This is Spärkle Tap
I got the publication rights to my story back a few days ago. I’ve republished it on Medium and Substack.
But you could always buy the book Body of Work. On Amazon if you really must - and here’s an affiliate link - or better yet direct from the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild here.
As the writer I was right chuffed to hear a deep-dive discussion on my story. It was overwhelmingly positive - though to be fair I haven’t heard it say anything negative about anything yet - and it gave every sign of not just having read my story but understanding it very well, picking up the subtle clues I’d scattered here and there about the dangers of technology.
As a writer, wouldn’t it be great to have a deep review of your work? For free? Right now?
As a reader, here’s a handy assistant to explain what’s going on and what you might have missed. You can ask questions and get it to drill down into aspects you aren’t quite full bottle on.
Be warned, that if you don’t want AI reading your stuff, this is pretty much exactly that. You are training AI on your work. If you aren’t okay with that for dogma or faith reasons, don’t do it.
Here’s the site:
Check it out!
Britni
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