Some years back, I wrote a couple of articles on creativity for an online music magazine. The views I expressed in them haven’t changed much, so I still share them from time to time.
In December of 2023, Google opened up general access to their NotebookLM project—an experimental AI-powered research and note-taking tool that can play the part of a very capable research assistant. This includes analyzing source materials you upload, and providing summaries and reviews. Amazing stuff, but not particularly novel in the AI world anymore. But it does something else, too- it can generate an actual discussion about the material between two virtual “hosts”—think your typical male/female podcasting team—and render that to an audio wav file. The results can be surprising.
Without saying much more, here are links to the two articles I mentioned, followed by the audio discussions generated about them by NotebookLM.
The voices in the following audio files are completely AI generated
AI on “Confessions of a Serial Creative”
AI on “The Real Deal: Creative Authenticity”
To me, the achievement here is shocking. And it’s no longer a nudge, but more of a hard shove into what this technology is capable of right now.
I found the “hosts” inserted a few conventional ideas where I didn’t, talking about the “soul” in a piece of music, for instance. It’s these kinds of fall-back ambiguities that illustrate, when left to its own devices, AI will rely on poetry when it comes to more esoteric matters. After all, it’s learning from us, and it’s going to inherit our general understanding about profound topics. In absence of more adequate insight, it thinks the way people generally do, for better and worse.
But people aren’t capable of reasoning at the speed or scale that AI does, so it becomes critically important that there be no stabs in the dark when it comes to ideas forming the foundation of our identity and values. In fact, I would argue that for an emergent intelligence that’s likely destined to mentor our entire race, absolute clarity and understanding of fundamental truths is an absolute necessity. Especially the ones that transcend but include humanity itself.
Artificial Intelligence is approaching a threshold where the word “artificial” may no longer apply. Intelligence doesn’t care what it’s source is, and ultimately, its validity is measured by its quality. We humans have had a decent monopoly on human behavior for a long time, but it doesn’t take a futurist to see that’s changing, and fast. Clarifying our understanding about the nature of self, experience, and the universe in which these arise has never been more important.
