NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide audio overviews

This works pretty well. I tried it with this guidance prompt:

    You are both pelicans who work as data
    journalist at a pelican news service.
    Discuss this from the perspective of
    pelican data journalists, being sure
    to inject as many pelican related
    anecdotes as possible

Against this article: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/video-scraping/

You can listen to the 7m40s resulting MP4 here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/notebooklm-pelicans/

Example snippets:

    You ever find yourself wading through
    mountains of data trying to pluck out
    the juicy bits? It's like hunting for
    a single shrimp in a whole kelp forest,
    am I right?

And:

    The future of data journalism is
    looking brighter than a school of
    silversides reflecting the morning sun.
    Until next time, keep those wings
    spread, those eyes sharp, and those
    minds open. There's a whole ocean
    of data out there just waiting to be
    explored.

Aside from being invited to a few events (Google I/O, OpenAI DevDay twice, an upcoming Anthropic hackathon that I applied for and was accepted) I've had no compensation from any of the LLM vendors.

I've been invited to a few alpha/beta previews for all three of OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, and I've received API credits as an attendee of the DevDay events.

I write about this stuff because it's really interesting to me, and super fun to explore.

we really want to know who is behind big pelican

Fwiw, I'd say this falls under the guidelines "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

Do you think it's possible to make the conversation adversarial or is that against the guardrails?

I'd be very surprised if they had that completely airtight, I bet we'll see some examples of people breaking that soon.

Hah, just found this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1g64iyi/holy_sh... - many f-bombs.

That feels/sounds so natural.

It’s amazing how it doesn’t occur to OpenAI and others that the “safety guardrails” really dilute the output. And it’s a display of conservatism. Bizarre to think that in America AI couldn’t swear.

Until today, where Google allowed the AI to behave as the lord intended.

What did you mean by pelicans? Googled but didn't understand, is it a term for having a type of data expertise?

Pretty sure they just meant one of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican

Simon likes to test LLMs' creativity by asking them questions about pelicans

For someone from Turkey, "Pelican Journalists" indeed has a political meaning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelikan_(organization)

Is there any way to use NotebookLM audio generation with an API?

Why do you think it doesn't occur to them? I'm genuinely curious.

It seems to me these alignment questions are a conscious trade-off between giving users what they ask for and brand safety knowing that every spicy output will immediately find its way to twitter/reddit/etc.

I haven't had a face to go with these voices, and now they are canonically two pelicans. Thank you for putting this in my head.

No way! That's fascinating, thanks.

I did! See also: https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=pelican