NotebookLM launches feature to customize and guide audio overviews

AI tooling has now made it too easy to find things.

On a web forum I am admin on, a user opened a DM a week ago titled "Google Notebook LM", someone else had shared a generated podcast thing that summarised the view of the forum on a particular subject, and it called out the usernames of someone who had strong opinions.

In response, another user ran with this and asked for a podcast to be generated summarising everything that was said by the user, their political views and all their hot takes.

Erm... uh-oh.

The use of real identity, the use of the same username across multiple sites, now makes it trivial for things like "take this Github username, find what sites the same username exists on, make a narrative of everything they've ever said, find the best and worst of what they've ever said"... which is terrifying.

I've said to the user the same old line we always repeat, "anything placed on the internet is effectively public forever", but only now are the consequences of this really being seen.

The forums I run allow username changes, encourage anonymity as much as possible, but we're at a point where multiple online identities, one for every site, interest, employer, etc... is probably the best way to go.

I notice on HN that there are many accounts that seem to register just to comment on particular stories and nothing more, and the comments are constructive and well thought out, and now I wonder whether some are just ahead of the curve on this — obscuring the totality of their identity from future employers, or anyone else who might use their words against them.

It feels like our lightweight choices in the past will start to have significant consequences in the present or future, and it's only a failure of imagination that is delaying a change in user behaviour.

And that's just what amateurs can do.

Yeah the light cone of online activity seems to only grow with little diminishing, which seems unnatural and counter to the type of environment we evolved for. GDPR and the right to be forgotten seemed funny in my youth, now I see it as wisdom ahead of its time.

The ability to do that exists, and was always going to eventually be easier. We used to all use pseudonyms but that fell out of fashion somewhat; and even then over time its inevitable you'll say one or a few things that can deanonymyze you. This was always going to happen and we can only hope it will change the public perception about privacy, which to this point has often been indifference or even annoyance when one brings it up.

> I notice on HN that there are many accounts that seem to register just to comment on particular stories and nothing more, and the comments are constructive and well thought out, and now I wonder whether some are just ahead of the curve on this — obscuring the totality of their identity from future employers, or anyone else who might use their words against them.

Throw aways are very common here for that purpose! On my end I'm becoming more interested in how to safeguard users -- anonymize them -- and also how to make easy to _generate_ throwaways without opening the door to spam (e.g. generate from a valid account, but then detach it). HN likely gets around this by being niche; I think the somewhat unattractive site design helps there.