It Might Be Robots Episode 7: The Robots are Podcasting!
[00:00:00]
Dan: Hey, Dan. Hi, Dave.
Dave: is October 5th, Saturday.
Dan: It is October the 5th. Yes.
Indiana here, the leaves are turning and some of the weather in the evening is getting cool and it's quite pleasant and makes you feel like making chili, you know, This morning, it said 59 degrees. I was out to run an errand I was on, McGalliard in Muncie and as I stepped out of my vehicle, by the way, it's "Glocktoberfest"
Dave: Ooh,
Dan: if you're going to the gun store on Saturday morning.
Dave: nice.
Dan: Nonetheless, 59 degrees. And as I was exiting the car today, there was a smell of ocean breeze. And bacon and egg biscuit sandwiches on the like I I know I just wanted to stand there in the parking lot and just it felt like being near the ocean [00:01:00] today With that breakfasty food going on at the same time like man the promise of today just ratcheted up significantly
Dave: yeah, it's pretty nice. It's uh, it's like, it's like being in those Mediterranean climates briefly, you know, during the year, a couple of times a year in central Indiana, you get that weather that you get like in central California where all the wineries are, you know, and the whole reason there is great growing there is because it has that Mediterranean style climate.
Dan: Yes,
Dave: that feel as
Dan: yes
Dave: up in the morning and it's cool. And then in the late afternoon, it gets to 80. And it more, it feels more like, huh,
Dan: Yeah,
Dave: I thought we were in fall, but
Dan: yeah
Dave: All right. Here's two old men
Dan: Well,
Dave: weather. What could be more scintillating?
Dan: It's important if you're trying to eat local because that's the here's a great word I learned a few years ago the terroir
Dave: Yeah.
Dan: the Of the place is transmitted into what you're eating based on its climate and how it behaves and like, you know It's [00:02:00] a thing. It's a thing,
Dave: kind
Dan: know,
Dave: about wine and thought I might pursue that just because it's so interesting and has so much that's related to science and history and chemistry and, and. Politics and everything else. I, I bought several different books. One of them was "Wine For Dummies," and, then
Dan: I love the "...For Dummies" series.
Dave: a few trips to central California, that area north of San Francisco and some South drove over the mountains into Mendocino and some of the other places that are just so amazing. And one of the things that I was really surprised to learn. how micro a micro climate can get you know what I mean?
I mean in some cases
Dan: No,
Dave: a
Dan: what do you mean?
Dave: where a specific hillside Gets a certain amount of shade more than the rest of the land that they're growing grapes on and therefore
Dan: Okay,
Dave: and that the fog hangs there a little bit longer than the rest of the place
Dan: [00:03:00] okay
Dave: you choose a varietal For that two acres, you know, because it's a perfect microclimate for that specific varietal and then all around it, where that doesn't happen, you have other grapes growing.
And I had no idea that it was that hyper local. And some of that may be a little bit fussy, but it's pretty cool.
Dan: Okay, no, it is pretty cool and it reminds me of something in Michael Pollan's book "A Place Of My Own" where he's describing He has this pie wedged shape of property that has because of its incline. He said it's a not a great piece of property It's not flat like the American lawn. You really have to do some things But he had a a piece of the back of his property that was higher in elevation, but it was also wetter Which was strange but he wound up planting raspberries there because it was absolutely perfect He said, this is, this is where you want them.
They get this level of sun. They get this, this, this. He also said, if you plant raspberries, be prepared that you will never get them out of the ground ever again. Because [00:04:00] digging a raspberry out of the ground is horrific.
Dave: both Jennie and I now have children that live in Oregon. my sons, live in Portland her daughter Xoe lives in Astoria. so one of the things that's interesting about visiting Oregon is And I have visited some wineries there as well. Somebody along the way brought with them blackberries and raspberry plants to add them to the landscape.
And they, they work in the way that you would expect them to providing just this. You're, you're walking along. If you think about a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, there's suddenly nourishment. There's suddenly
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: nourishment, and has of course done what a lot of these kinds of species do, it has completely overrun areas, and there's just this common kind of, wherever you want to stop, as long as you're safe, please feel free to stop and pick berries.
And, uh, [00:05:00] one winery that we went to, this is probably five years or so ago, but one winery that we went to the entirety of its drive up to the tasting room was just lined with blackberry bushes and raspberry bushes. And there were cars, you know, that were pulled off in the grass.
And I mean, people had. Gallon sized pails full of delicious blackberries, you know, and so you could, you
Dan: Wow.
Dave: you, you picked a bunch of those and then went to the tasting room and had some berries with the wines that you were tasting, you know, but yeah,
Dan: Yes,
Dave: it's, it's a gift that keeps on giving and it's, it's very thorny and brambly and it's not easy to manage 100%. It's, uh, it's why it's so prevalent there now is they really don't have any way to sort of kill it back.
Dan: Saturday morning, I was maybe eight or nine years old. My dad woke me up early. And come on, get your shoes on. Okay. And so, and it was [00:06:00] fall, but not awful.
And we had a little woods to the South of our house. So out the front door and through across the front yard and across the lot that we owned next to us. And then into the woods, I'd never known my dad to go into the woods before. And I mean, that's where we all went and looked at dirty magazines and told stories.
I mean, you know, we went through the woods, we went to the other side and we came out on a property and this fella had blackberries and raspberries growing and my dad hands me plastic containers and said fill these and he just we just stood there picking in the back and then we went to my grandmother's house my mother's mother and dad had her make pies
Dave: you know, where we live here in Lafayette, the house we live in, there was a. I'm trying to remember the name of the berry. Oh, I think a mulberry tree, a
Dan: okay.
Dave: had
Dan: Okay.
Dave: itself onto a tree and wound its way around a limb that came over into the [00:07:00] hillside that's at the back of our house and it just became a buffet for animals.
There was a
Dan: Yes.
Dave: tree on one side that leaned over into that hill. And then there was this mulberry tree. And it was just ridiculous. It looked like something out of the Bambi Disney movie of all the
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: around. There was one point in time
at which there was a groundhog and like three birds. And two deer, all of them on the hillside eating. And I just said to Jennie it was like, look at this, this is ridiculous. You know, it's a buffet for the animals. And of course it creates all those other issues, but yeah,
Dan: I just saw a marvelous meme of a fruit somewhere in the world where the, the fruit falls and ferments because it's going to be there a while and a particular kind of bird eats them and lays on the sidewalk drunk and, and the, the people who live there are very careful to replace them into areas where they're, you know, it's just, that's marvelous, man.
Dave: I, I'm, uh, [00:08:00] heading into old age and into that zone of like, well, what am I going to do with my spare time? And one of those things is going to be watching cat videos online. It just will be because it's so entertaining. And
Dan: yes.
Dave: last
Dan: Yes,
Dave: across a collection of clips. of people with cats and catnip it is just great. I mean, as
Dan: yes.
Dave: one where the cat has its face in this jar of catnip and the owner is trying to pull, you know, trying to peel the head of the cat out and you can see it's still, Draining with its neck with all of its energy to keep its face down in there, you know And then one of the other things they're doing and i'm sure they've learned this from all of the ways in which there are marijuana Connoisseurs now that it's legal in many places. They're making catnip tea and having their cats drink the catnip tea And then they're just taking videos of what they look like afterwards and they are so stoned and it's so comical and then there will be [00:09:00] like a video where the cat somehow dug its way to where the catnip is Tore the bag open and it's all over the kitchen floor and the cat is just prone Laying on its back in the middle of all of the catnip, you know, and it's just anyway It's very it's very marvelous and extremely entertaining for only the cost of
Dan: Well,
Dave: wi fi or for Starbucks wi fi If
Dan: yeah,
Dave: there
Dan: I remember from early George Carlin line. And so I knew about drug culture early, like elementary school, kindergarten kind of things. But his line was, I'm about to cause one cost warning them goats eat that shit. Stay up all night and frolic. Now you tell me what we're eating and why is it wrong?
Dave: absolutely. It's so funny. All of those years. I remember, um, at Anderson High School, Anderson, Indiana, home of the Anderson Indians. Um, one of the things I needed was a health elective when I was in high school. And so one of the options was a class called [00:10:00] Alcohol and Narcotics and um, uh, Literally, and then this is 1973 74, my last year in school, got to get this elective,
Dan: right,
Dave: and of course the joke at school was, hey, the field trips are amazing, you know, that was the joke, they talked about, and it was both, you have to think about that time, right? So there's just this
Dan: sure.
Dave: clash. And.
Dan: My first year of high school had a smoking section outside.
Dave: different world, but what, what alcohol and narcotics as a health class at Anderson High School, it was taught, by the way, and all of us will understand what this means. It was taught by a coach who was also a driver ed instructor. So
Dan: Yeah, yeah.
Dave: the scholarly approach that was taken to that class, you know? And so, but one of the things that, Things that it was, as you realized early on, they were trying to use it as a cautionary class to talk about the
Dan: Sure, [00:11:00] sure,
Dave: don't let this happen to
Dan: sure.
Dave: and I will not mention the name of the teacher, but he was notorious for having alcohol in a cup holder.
In his car in the parking lot. And so you have an alcoholic warning all of us about how awful marijuana is, you know, and it's just, it's just like what a bizarre construct to this day. There are people who freak out about the idea of marijuana. While they're having their third cocktail, you know, it's it's like
Dan: Yeah,
Dave: How
do you have
that
duality
Dan: yeah.
Dave: and how do you not understand that there are Negative consequences to all sorts of things that create an alteration in your consciousness, you know By the way, the the
Dan: Yes.
Dave: you mentioned Michael Pollan a few minutes ago Uh our book club read five years ago six years ago his amazing book Uh, that's called "How To Change Your Mind."
And it's about hallucinogenics
Dan: and
Yeah, sure, the mushroom book. Yep, I've got it. Mm hmm, mm
Dave: Psilocybin and he does that thing that Michael Pollan does so extremely well, which is he [00:12:00] digs deep into the history of it. And, uh, he actually came and spoke at Purdue within about six months of our, uh, book club reading that book. one of the things you, you find out when you read his book about the, the sort of circuitous route that came to the point where all. Hallucinogenic drugs just were outlawed as a matter of principle by the United States government, but that's, the pendulum is swinging back the other way on those as well and has in some states, but it's a really interesting read because what you find out is one of the historical uses for those hallucinogenics and specifically psilocybin was as a really effective treatment. For alcoholism and for other addictions and for post traumatic stress disorder and extremely effective. And then, of course, when the whole thing happened with, Harvard Medical School when they were looking into hallucinogenics and then the Food and Drug Administration [00:13:00] just wildly reacted.
But that Michael Pollan book, "How to Change Your Mind" I've never been disappointed by any of the books of his that I've read ever.
Dan: No. No, indeed. Indeed. Indeed, indeed.
Dave: years ago as we were trying to do prep for "Rustle The Leaf" was "Second Nature." And to get
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: both, scientifically valid, well researched, and historically valid, kind of approach to really does it mean when you say an indigenous species? What does that mean?
Dan: Yes,
Dave: of the
Dan: yes.
Dave: are we talking about? And so many other things that he wrote about, but yeah, some really interesting
Dan: Of all of the books that we read, doing that, of all doing the Rustle The Leaf podcast. 'cause I was reading hundreds of pages of environmental science a week. I mean, we, I, we read Silent Spring, I read Environmentalism for Dummies. I read several books on nuclear power and nuclear waste and those sorts of things.
And I, I knew about. I knew about mining heavy metals out of the [00:14:00] ground because of some of those books and the environmental impact of some of those things, but his book was the sole book that was hopeful and and his line that the garden is the place where the relationship between man and the land is mutually beneficial.
And it was like, what a seminal thing for him to say. If you're looking for hope, there it is. All you have to do is care for and tend the land to its health, We garden here. It's always just tomatoes now and it's over for this season, but managing the soil health
it's really what you're doing. You're managing the microbiology that's going on here because that's the health of the plant, like eating right and going to the gym or any of those other sorts of things that the plant. And the plant gets more delicious. So if you're a hedonist,Managing the soil health really has meant more delicious tomatoes, which I like how that can be connected on a large scale on a small scale.
Dave: highly enough all those [00:15:00] Michael Pollan books. They're just so interesting and engaging and often really funny as well.
Dan: He can go from a four letter expletive to quoting Emerson in one paragraph. Like, wow, I love him.
Dave: it's a,
at least for me, anyway,
Dan: Right?
Dave: segue into AI. I came across something in a Reddit post the other day that I shared with you, it's from 1855. It's from "Punch". magazine, andit's essentially a political cartoon. That's making fun of early photography. And I will post this in the timeline of the show because it's, it's
Dan: All right.
Dave: entertaining. And basically what it shows is a family, a complex family. There's babies, there's multiple adults, there's kids, and they're posing for This picture. And then what they show as the actual photograph is the way things happened in [00:16:00] with early photography. So everybody's face is smeared. The baby is crying instead of actually looking like it's smiling. And the point that they're making is, Hey, if you use an illustrator or a portrait artist, the way you're supposed to versus using this awful technology, you'll get the family portrait that you want. And it's just so funny to see that because That's the issue that we're talking
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: good? Is it bad? It does. Who does it replace? Whose job does it take away? And suddenly. Photography comes along and all of those people that had studied art and portraiture and illustration and making, portraits of families that you could then produce using,lithography. All of that stuff starts getting replaced by photography, but who can look back in history and go, Oh, yeah, our decision to allow photography was a real big mistake to humankind.
it's like the joke I made about movable type. It's the same idea.
Dan: Right.
Dave: and inevitably they [00:17:00] do replace people. And processes that are part of the current construct. They just do, and they will. And, uh, so anyway, as we continue to explore AI stuff, one of the things that happens with me now is in my Instagram feed and Facebook and other social media feeds, I am now gettingCreators who are building out their presence online as resources for, here's this new AI that came along this week and here are the features.
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: And two weeks
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: and we teased this at the end of the show last week,
it's an experimental tool. called NotebookLM from Google. And here's the basic idea of NotebookLM. Imagine having a notebook. That's the metaphor. And you're in a class about something. Pick a subject, whatever it is. And you're taking notes about it.
Maybe you have a pocket in the notebook, and you put some other documents in there. But this notebook is the repository for everything that you're trying to learn about a specific subject. [00:18:00] And that metaphor is exactly right. It is, you could go find scholarly articles on a website, and can go your own information about something.
You can copy and paste text into it, but essentially what NotebookLM is. It is a digital repository for information, and it treats all of that information as if the notebook AI that's behind it, that's managing it, a, research tool. And so creates FAQs, it creates question and answer quizzes, it creates summaries and briefs from whatever resources you give it. And the number of resources you give it is limited. the amount of words that you can paste into a document to have added as a resource is limited. But essentially what happens, and I'm going to share the screen and show you what the interface looks like, it becomes a place. [00:19:00] Where it produces processes and tools for better learning, bullet points, study guides, all of that kind of thing. and none of that is terribly exciting, it's pretty cool that you can, you know, feed it a bunch of resources and have it summarize those things for you.
Dan: If I were managing a college, I would be shaking in some of my boots.
Dave: thing about what they're trying to do with this is they're really trying to go, every single thing that it gives you back as a piece of study or information, it has a citation Yeah. so that's why, this actually becomes the kind of tool that for academic use is way more credible than just, I went to chat GPT and then ran its
Dan: Right.
Dave: filter to try to mask that it came from the AI. So that when I send that in as a term paper, I believe it's accurate and it may be filled with inaccuracies. What NotebookLM is doing and actually Stanford [00:20:00] university just this week, I found out. has published a publicly usable, much less sizzly version of this idea. And I'll share that in a moment too.
But here's why NotebookLM freaked everybody out. Because in addition to it providing this sort of way of synthesizing information and creating study guides and other information that are cited, the other thing that it does, one of the ways that it would summarize the information was by writing a fake podcast script having fake AI voices talk about the subject. I'm going to share my screen really quickly and then in a
Dan: Okay.
Dave: some of
Dan: All right.
Dave: but here is
Dan: Okay.
Dave: looks like. for NotebookLM. Uh, so I'm sharing it now and hopefully it will show up in the recording. I can see it. I think you can see it. So what's
Dan: can't.
Dave: and I'm going to switch [00:21:00] over here just to sort of nose around in here. As you can see over here on the left, the sources that I've given it. So one of the things that I've given. Given it is all of the transcripts for every it might be robot podcast that we've done. So you can click on that and you can see here's the gas station barbecue one from last week and you can see that that transcript is in there and the AI has done a summary of it and it's even given it key topics related to how it's going to prepare a study guide for that show. And then over here you can see these are notes that have been saved and you can see this and this is really important. It says here, seven citations. So here's a saved note that's basically a summary of what this is about. And this is based on all of the information that I've given it. So I've given it our transcriptions, but I've also given it the website.
It might be robots. com, because there's some other information there as well. And you can see, as I open [00:22:00] these notes, here is an episode 1 through 6 study guide. Remember, this is a notebook, and it gives you the answers. And it even gives you at the bottom a glossary of terms, which talks both about, you know, AI tools that we're using, but also about just some general topics, as if the person who is studying this has no idea.
All right? And it even gives you suggestions for things. So I'm going to pop up this notebook guide now, and you can see here. Well, let's look at the FAQ for this. And so what's happening right now is the AI is thinking about it and it's going to generate a frequently asked questions, kind of a study tool to help with learning about the, it might be robots podcast. and what I'm going to do now, and it's weird, I haven't figured out the interface where the screen share. So there it is. It might be robots podcast FAQ. What is it? Who are Dave Ponce and Dan Wright? What sparked the idea? How did they use AI? What are some challenges? So again, It feels like a [00:23:00] digital notebook I'll go back and look at that again.
And you can see in here. That it's got all of these nice listings for what's going on and if you go in and look at the
Dan: Well, could you go back please? Who does it say we are? Like, I want, I want, like that one, I know the answer to that one, so.
Dave: and creative
Dan: Wow,
Dave: with over 30 years of experience working together Dave primarily works as an advertising copywriter and creative director with extensive experience in video and audio He's also a songwriter a musician Dan comes from a cartooning and comedic performance background working as a visual communicator and artist.
He's also a musician with a particular interest in gypsy jazz guitar.
Dan: this robot gets an A. Ha
Dave: again,
Dan: ha ha ha.
Dave: to show you, I'm going to pop up this little guide down here at the bottom. By the way, all of the chat that I've had with the robot, let me click on that. um, oh, well, you know what that chat isn't presently available, which is kind of interesting.
I think it maybe
Dan: [00:24:00] Oh.
Dave: of days, but it lets you have all these saved notes. But the other thing I want
Dan: Okay.
Dave: over here, Dan, is it says click to load the conversation and. Audio overview, and I'm going to load this conversation right now. This, the formatting for it, the style of it is as if these two people who are talking about, it might be robots podcasters and while that's loading, I'm going to actually play you some of this because I can't really figure
Dan: Okay. Alright.
Dave: Here's
Dan: Okay.
Dave: these two people sound like talking about the, It Might Be Robots podcast. Ever feel like AI is kind of, you know, sneaking up on us? Yeah, definitely. Today we're diving into AI and creativity with, uh, Dave and Dan from the It Might Be Robots podcast.
Right. They're looking at how AI is changing things up for artists and musicians and maybe even, you know, Podcasters like us, us, exactly. And trust me, some of their experiences will really make you think [00:25:00] so let's jump right in. Yeah. It's, it's funny how we talk about it. Now, let me just say this two weeks ago when I did this, by the way, I'm still sharing the screen here so I can show you this. You have options
Dan: huh.
Dave: tell the AI just like as if you were asking it to draw a picture for you in DALL-E. You
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: up or a thumbs down. You can share
Dan: Okay.
Dave: And again, this is
Dan: Right.
Dave: so it's somewhere in a Google drive. can download this conversation. You can delete it. So I have downloaded one of the original versions of this. Uh, this one you can see in here that's loaded up is 24
Dan: Ha ha ha.
Dave: minutes. The first one of these that I did that you heard about a week and a half ago, Dan was only
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: nine minutes long and they were not referring to themselves as podcasters. So just. In the two weeks. what I did was I have three versions of their summaries.
And what I do is I download the one that they've done, [00:26:00] I delete it. And
Dan: Uh huh. Uh huh. then download and delete it and.
Dave: this is the third of these and it's 24 minutes long. And I was saying to Dan, when we were talking about this yesterday, what happens is it's very much like working in mid journey, where all of a sudden the prompts seem to not matter anymore. And it starts to get unfocused and it starts to throw weird things in. That's exactly what happens with these podcasts and NotebookLM. You can see that this is now up to 24 minutes. Once upon a time, it was a nine minute summary. And I can tell you, it was, it was crispy and crunchy and had meaning. And in this 24 minute podcast, these two podcasters and the script that's been generated, just they meander, they repeat each other.
They say the same exact phrases back and forth. That's really odd. It's like, Oh, well, by the time you've asked for a third or fourth generation of the same data starts going, well, I don't know what you want. I gave you that first [00:27:00] one. Okay. You may want something different. And so it does that. And I'll just play a little more of this because it really is compelling to hear some of this and I'll skip around.
Hang on. AI is if it's this like just remixing right? Is it really original existing material? And you know, And what does that mean? Copyright, you know in the age of AI Huge questions. It's a lot. Yes. It's a lot to unpack. It's almost like asking, like, what makes us human? Right. If, if machines can just do what we do, like faster and better in a lot of cases.
And often even better. Yeah. And, and if an AI can just, you know, pump out a catchy jingle, that devalue the work of actual musicians? That's the question, isn't it? Right. It's a tough one. It's a real head scratcher. It is. And this is where this like. So again, Dan, right? Right.
Dan: Like, all of the, like us humans, like, that is [00:28:00] so marvelous that that builds that in.
Dave: just telling you, man, uh, really interesting that, and, and the hook that got me to dig into it two weeks ago was one of these, you know, people that are building out an Instagram channel to get viewers and monetize it. The hook that they used to get me to watch it was, Did Google just kill podcasting? So, and I was
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: trying to get a podcast going here with Dan. Let me go find out what this means. And intNotebookLMLM I went,
Okay, I was gonna ask you, you think for right now, it's free. Eventually, it's not going to be free.
reason I say that is that's what Google has done with Gemini. I mean, what started out
Dan: Okay.
Dave: as Google Bard that was free to Google account users. You were in the queue, like with a lot of free text to image applications, where if you are in an unpaid account, it's going to go slow, or they may limit the number of times you can use it every day. And as you get into different payment tiers, it goes faster. You get more use, et cetera. [00:29:00] So my belief is that what's going to happen with. This product is it's going to go through that kind of testing and seeing how people use it and it's going to make those kind of improvements. For example, right now it says on that podcast, fake podcast creation, right now it's only in English and it's only with those two voices.
Well, you know where that's going to go. It's going to go into multiple languages. It's going to go into podcasters that maybe can be your own voice synthesized. And, and that's why that guy's hook did Google just kill podcasting. He may not be that far off in some ways, because the truth is that's a pretty credible sounding human conversation. And it, it is really remarkable. And so of course, what you, I think eventually where this tool will go. Is you'll be able to look at the transcript that it created. You'll be able to edit or delete things out of that and have it remanufacture That discussion and [00:30:00] in that kind of world once again Do you ever then have to go pay hundreds of dollars for microphones?
Do you ever have you know what I mean? No, you really don't it. It doesn't mean it's inauthentic It just means that you can set it up in a way that kicks down further technology and time barriers. And again, the basis of all of it is this idea that it is cited from the sources that you give it.
And so here's an example of what NotebookLM then does. it's talking about it might be robots. It is giving you narrative about the sources that I've given it, but in that podcast, if you were to listen to all of it, there are generalizations about AI that are not part of that source material. And that is Google going to Gemini to fill in the blanks and add context to this specific topic. And that's really what NotebookLM does. Oh, you want to learn about. Early cameras from the 1850s. From to [00:31:00] 1875, post Civil War, you want to learn about what cameras were used in the field, okay? It's going to take all the source material that you have found about it, maybe even your own research paper, but it is going to fill in other blanks from looking at its own large language model. And that podcast that it creates, or maybe even its study guide that it creates, will have a citation for this other website that it went to. Now, I don't want to get too geeky about this, Dan. Here now is an example that I will share of an actual program that's just been introduced by Stanford University that is more Credible in terms of its scholarly approach and it's an amazing thing Let me show the screen here really quickly.
this is again Stanford University I just heard about it through one of these same kind of resources that I hear about now and then as is often the case with me i'm like man, I want to go find out about this and I we were doing a podcast or not. I would be doing this because I just Deeply [00:32:00] interested in this and in learning and I'm strongly motivated to figure out ways to be more accurate and to save time and to ramp up work product or whatever it is that I'm trying to do. So here now I'll share my screen and let me change the tab here. Um, so this is called STORM what you're going to see in this screen share is, um, a topic that I gave STORM. And then we'll, we'll, you know, kind of chat about it for a moment. So hopefully you can see this and what, what we're looking at here is the Stanford university pilot model of STORM is what they've called it. You can choose a new session, but I'm logged in through my Google account and I've asked it to give me. Uh, just a paper, if you will, about public domain Jazz Standards. So you can see here that I can choose to show this as a PDF document if I want to, but I want you to see [00:33:00] how this is built. All right. So it is a summary. It is a history. And then it starts going through how it really believes. What I've asked it for should be presented to me. And you can see here that there are citations throughout. This does not allow you, at least as what I've seen so far, this doesn't allow you to put in your own sources. This is using the World Wide Web and Stanford University's libraries. to do this. So it's using Stanford's language model, whichever one they're tapped into, and it's using their own resources to create this, okay? And you can see all those citations in there. But here's what's really cool. In these examples of notable compositions for public domain jazz standards, you see these citations here where it's giving you the name of the author, giving you the year that it was published, etc. So, This is a really cool kind of very useful summary. If you have some information [00:34:00] and you can give it feedback. I want to point this out, Dan, because this is mind blowing to me. What STORM does is it creates personalities. And I'll show you what it calls them for this. My ask was what I really asked it for was I want to know in with public domain jazz standards, here's what I want to know. I want to know if there are some structural similarities to how those songs were written. And I want to know if there were some topical similarities to how those were written. And then it asks you for one follow up question. STORM says to you, well, why, what do you hope to get as a result from this thesis? And you have to give it a little bit of a description. And then off it goes and does its work. So I haven't, to be fair, I haven't really fully read all of this, but I skimmed it and thought, well, it didn't really give me what I asked it for, but it's given me some pretty good information here, but here's what it did to provide [00:35:00] all of this information. created four robot personalities to do it. And you can see this, it's called the brainSTORMing process. So I want you to notice. the basic FactWriter robot, and you can see what it asked, and you can see what its large, its large language model gave as answers. Here is a copyright expert. So in those citations where it was talking about, this is in the public domain, here's the author. It's giving you those citations coming from a legal perspective. Again, this is a university application no doubt is designed to help students not just put BS into their writing, you know, then you can see another robot as a musicologist and another one is a historian of jazz. so it's using that combination of those robot personalities, to build out this paper. And to give [00:36:00] me all of the citations that it found from the World Wide Web. And when you watch it happen,
If you leave it up live on the screen you see in real time Websites come up and you see library citations come up and they're all urls that it's going to And you just see them
Dan: Wow.
Dave: your screen as it's having these conversations.
So, I see the, the STORM application with Stanford and I see NotebookLM as these are the managers and creators and users at scale of artificial intelligence going. "All right, one of the things we're learning early on is this can be inaccurate. It's not trustworthy. People can put things out there that aren't true. What can we do to add guardrails?" And if you're a university program, this is a really great response. It is "No, let's admit that you're going to use Google search and other AI tools to try to help you write your paper.
Let's admit that, let's make sure that you don't create a circumstance where somebody expels you because of plagiarism or because of [00:37:00] inaccuracy."
What do you do with this kind of technology and frankly this kind of power? you go, "Let's figure out ways to continue using it for good."
I think the idea that I mean bluntly I think the idea that it's controllable is naive.
Dan: I don't think it can be controlled. I think it's up to the individual to use it well.
it's one more of those. This is like hiring a team of creative people.
Dave: I see the value in that NotebookLM tool more now than I did before you and I started talking this morning.
I'm excited about seeing, entrepreneurs and other entities come to this with, the admission that it's going to be here rather
Dan: Yeah,
Dave: let's abandon this altogether,
Dan: I've heard other creative people be of the mind that, "Oh, I want nothing to do with that," which I think is short sighted. I think it's exactly the Punch cartoon that you showed. Is exactly that.
to say no to the technology [00:38:00] because you've not tried it, It's naive and short sighted and professionally, I lose respect for creative people that don't have the I'm gonna say sense of adventure to get in there and try it out.
Dave: Yeah
I think I told you the story about working at an advertising agency in 1984 and 85 and 86 and trying to introduce the art director who was a university professor. I was trying to introduce him to Macintosh technology and to what it could mean for the throughput of comps for clients. Now this is an agency with serious Fortune 200 kinds of business to business accounts. And was like I was showing him a vial of disease. you could see his visceral reaction.
And, and he wanted zero to do with it because he had really become good at doing marker comps and a drawing fonts by hand that look like the fonts. [00:39:00] And he's absolutely uninterested in this. and for me, it's that same reaction, Dan, I lost quite a bit of respect for him over it because it's like, by the time it's to the point where you and I can get in the car and go to the computer store and buy one of these. How are you contending for the idea that this should go away and that it's not something that's proven and valid? It's like, that got
Dan: yes.
Dave: a long time ago. Now
Dan: Yes. Yes.
Dave: how can I better prepare my students and how can I more fully serve my clients and my agency being
Dan: Yes.
Dave: job with this technology? I, and, and again, it's the debate that goes on every single time a new piece of technology comes on the scene. You have the
Dan: Yeah, right
Dave: interest in deciding they don't want it.
Dan: And here's what I wanted to say about that. Yes, you absolutely, You have at scale succeeded at it on really the national [00:40:00] marketplace with a syndicated comic strip. You have learned to draw in a way that the style of it, the intellect of it, the preciousness of it is unique. And you've applied those skills to succeed in that scale. To me, that is a skill set and a group of practices and sketchbooks filled with how to hone your craft that are all valid. But I think it's not any less valid to go have a notebook filled with skills that I have used for my craft for prompting, a different way of doing it. The dichotomy that I heard that I love that I still return to I got from a book on pottery and this author said The dichotomy was the workmanship of risk versus the workmanship of certainty And I still carry that around with me because I find value in that if you are painting something It's a concrete thing it exists in [00:41:00] reality the next choice of brushstroke that you make might Destroy this
Dave: And Of course you can use the computer to, to express yourself and to curate an experience for somebody else to have, of course you can. Can you use the computer to make art?
Dan: philosophically I'm gonna line up with the people who say, of course you can.
It's one more tool.
Dave: but it, you know, it exists in digital space, not physical space until it gets printed out somewhere. But I don't, you know, again, if you just objectively look at it and go, both of these are somebody's artistic expression, just using different media.
Dan: well one of the ways that you would look at that is. show me a digital reproduction Of anything because show me a digital first off that you that got created that sells at christie's for millions
Dave: what occurred to me just now in thinking about this and talking about it, was there ever a point when Jackson Pollock looked at a finished canvas and went, "No, THAT'S not right." "
Dan: a lot of cool stuff going on, Dan [00:42:00] and, um, more to come, this is the, "It Might Be Robots" podcast. I'm Dave Ponce. And I'm Dan Wright.
Dave: See you, Dan...
Dan: Okay. Bye.
[00:00:00]
Dan: Hey, Dan. Hi, Dave.
Dave: is October 5th, Saturday.
Dan: It is October the 5th. Yes.
Indiana here, the leaves are turning and some of the weather in the evening is getting cool and it's quite pleasant and makes you feel like making chili, you know, This morning, it said 59 degrees. I was out to run an errand I was on, McGalliard in Muncie and as I stepped out of my vehicle, by the way, it's "Glocktoberfest"
Dave: Ooh,
Dan: if you're going to the gun store on Saturday morning.
Dave: nice.
Dan: Nonetheless, 59 degrees. And as I was exiting the car today, there was a smell of ocean breeze. And bacon and egg biscuit sandwiches on the like I I know I just wanted to stand there in the parking lot and just it felt like being near the ocean [00:01:00] today With that breakfasty food going on at the same time like man the promise of today just ratcheted up significantly
Dave: yeah, it's pretty nice. It's uh, it's like, it's like being in those Mediterranean climates briefly, you know, during the year, a couple of times a year in central Indiana, you get that weather that you get like in central California where all the wineries are, you know, and the whole reason there is great growing there is because it has that Mediterranean style climate.
Dan: Yes,
Dave: that feel as
Dan: yes
Dave: up in the morning and it's cool. And then in the late afternoon, it gets to 80. And it more, it feels more like, huh,
Dan: Yeah,
Dave: I thought we were in fall, but
Dan: yeah
Dave: All right. Here's two old men
Dan: Well,
Dave: weather. What could be more scintillating?
Dan: It's important if you're trying to eat local because that's the here's a great word I learned a few years ago the terroir
Dave: Yeah.
Dan: the Of the place is transmitted into what you're eating based on its climate and how it behaves and like, you know It's [00:02:00] a thing. It's a thing,
Dave: kind
Dan: know,
Dave: about wine and thought I might pursue that just because it's so interesting and has so much that's related to science and history and chemistry and, and. Politics and everything else. I, I bought several different books. One of them was "Wine For Dummies," and, then
Dan: I love the "...For Dummies" series.
Dave: a few trips to central California, that area north of San Francisco and some South drove over the mountains into Mendocino and some of the other places that are just so amazing. And one of the things that I was really surprised to learn. how micro a micro climate can get you know what I mean?
I mean in some cases
Dan: No,
Dave: a
Dan: what do you mean?
Dave: where a specific hillside Gets a certain amount of shade more than the rest of the land that they're growing grapes on and therefore
Dan: Okay,
Dave: and that the fog hangs there a little bit longer than the rest of the place
Dan: [00:03:00] okay
Dave: you choose a varietal For that two acres, you know, because it's a perfect microclimate for that specific varietal and then all around it, where that doesn't happen, you have other grapes growing.
And I had no idea that it was that hyper local. And some of that may be a little bit fussy, but it's pretty cool.
Dan: Okay, no, it is pretty cool and it reminds me of something in Michael Pollan's book "A Place Of My Own" where he's describing He has this pie wedged shape of property that has because of its incline. He said it's a not a great piece of property It's not flat like the American lawn. You really have to do some things But he had a a piece of the back of his property that was higher in elevation, but it was also wetter Which was strange but he wound up planting raspberries there because it was absolutely perfect He said, this is, this is where you want them.
They get this level of sun. They get this, this, this. He also said, if you plant raspberries, be prepared that you will never get them out of the ground ever again. Because [00:04:00] digging a raspberry out of the ground is horrific.
Dave: both Jennie and I now have children that live in Oregon. my sons, live in Portland her daughter Xoe lives in Astoria. so one of the things that's interesting about visiting Oregon is And I have visited some wineries there as well. Somebody along the way brought with them blackberries and raspberry plants to add them to the landscape.
And they, they work in the way that you would expect them to providing just this. You're, you're walking along. If you think about a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, there's suddenly nourishment. There's suddenly
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: nourishment, and has of course done what a lot of these kinds of species do, it has completely overrun areas, and there's just this common kind of, wherever you want to stop, as long as you're safe, please feel free to stop and pick berries.
And, uh, [00:05:00] one winery that we went to, this is probably five years or so ago, but one winery that we went to the entirety of its drive up to the tasting room was just lined with blackberry bushes and raspberry bushes. And there were cars, you know, that were pulled off in the grass.
And I mean, people had. Gallon sized pails full of delicious blackberries, you know, and so you could, you
Dan: Wow.
Dave: you, you picked a bunch of those and then went to the tasting room and had some berries with the wines that you were tasting, you know, but yeah,
Dan: Yes,
Dave: it's, it's a gift that keeps on giving and it's, it's very thorny and brambly and it's not easy to manage 100%. It's, uh, it's why it's so prevalent there now is they really don't have any way to sort of kill it back.
Dan: Saturday morning, I was maybe eight or nine years old. My dad woke me up early. And come on, get your shoes on. Okay. And so, and it was [00:06:00] fall, but not awful.
And we had a little woods to the South of our house. So out the front door and through across the front yard and across the lot that we owned next to us. And then into the woods, I'd never known my dad to go into the woods before. And I mean, that's where we all went and looked at dirty magazines and told stories.
I mean, you know, we went through the woods, we went to the other side and we came out on a property and this fella had blackberries and raspberries growing and my dad hands me plastic containers and said fill these and he just we just stood there picking in the back and then we went to my grandmother's house my mother's mother and dad had her make pies
Dave: you know, where we live here in Lafayette, the house we live in, there was a. I'm trying to remember the name of the berry. Oh, I think a mulberry tree, a
Dan: okay.
Dave: had
Dan: Okay.
Dave: itself onto a tree and wound its way around a limb that came over into the [00:07:00] hillside that's at the back of our house and it just became a buffet for animals.
There was a
Dan: Yes.
Dave: tree on one side that leaned over into that hill. And then there was this mulberry tree. And it was just ridiculous. It looked like something out of the Bambi Disney movie of all the
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: around. There was one point in time
at which there was a groundhog and like three birds. And two deer, all of them on the hillside eating. And I just said to Jennie it was like, look at this, this is ridiculous. You know, it's a buffet for the animals. And of course it creates all those other issues, but yeah,
Dan: I just saw a marvelous meme of a fruit somewhere in the world where the, the fruit falls and ferments because it's going to be there a while and a particular kind of bird eats them and lays on the sidewalk drunk and, and the, the people who live there are very careful to replace them into areas where they're, you know, it's just, that's marvelous, man.
Dave: I, I'm, uh, [00:08:00] heading into old age and into that zone of like, well, what am I going to do with my spare time? And one of those things is going to be watching cat videos online. It just will be because it's so entertaining. And
Dan: yes.
Dave: last
Dan: Yes,
Dave: across a collection of clips. of people with cats and catnip it is just great. I mean, as
Dan: yes.
Dave: one where the cat has its face in this jar of catnip and the owner is trying to pull, you know, trying to peel the head of the cat out and you can see it's still, Draining with its neck with all of its energy to keep its face down in there, you know And then one of the other things they're doing and i'm sure they've learned this from all of the ways in which there are marijuana Connoisseurs now that it's legal in many places. They're making catnip tea and having their cats drink the catnip tea And then they're just taking videos of what they look like afterwards and they are so stoned and it's so comical and then there will be [00:09:00] like a video where the cat somehow dug its way to where the catnip is Tore the bag open and it's all over the kitchen floor and the cat is just prone Laying on its back in the middle of all of the catnip, you know, and it's just anyway It's very it's very marvelous and extremely entertaining for only the cost of
Dan: Well,
Dave: wi fi or for Starbucks wi fi If
Dan: yeah,
Dave: there
Dan: I remember from early George Carlin line. And so I knew about drug culture early, like elementary school, kindergarten kind of things. But his line was, I'm about to cause one cost warning them goats eat that shit. Stay up all night and frolic. Now you tell me what we're eating and why is it wrong?
Dave: absolutely. It's so funny. All of those years. I remember, um, at Anderson High School, Anderson, Indiana, home of the Anderson Indians. Um, one of the things I needed was a health elective when I was in high school. And so one of the options was a class called [00:10:00] Alcohol and Narcotics and um, uh, Literally, and then this is 1973 74, my last year in school, got to get this elective,
Dan: right,
Dave: and of course the joke at school was, hey, the field trips are amazing, you know, that was the joke, they talked about, and it was both, you have to think about that time, right? So there's just this
Dan: sure.
Dave: clash. And.
Dan: My first year of high school had a smoking section outside.
Dave: different world, but what, what alcohol and narcotics as a health class at Anderson High School, it was taught, by the way, and all of us will understand what this means. It was taught by a coach who was also a driver ed instructor. So
Dan: Yeah, yeah.
Dave: the scholarly approach that was taken to that class, you know? And so, but one of the things that, Things that it was, as you realized early on, they were trying to use it as a cautionary class to talk about the
Dan: Sure, [00:11:00] sure,
Dave: don't let this happen to
Dan: sure.
Dave: and I will not mention the name of the teacher, but he was notorious for having alcohol in a cup holder.
In his car in the parking lot. And so you have an alcoholic warning all of us about how awful marijuana is, you know, and it's just, it's just like what a bizarre construct to this day. There are people who freak out about the idea of marijuana. While they're having their third cocktail, you know, it's it's like
Dan: Yeah,
Dave: How
do you have
that
duality
Dan: yeah.
Dave: and how do you not understand that there are Negative consequences to all sorts of things that create an alteration in your consciousness, you know By the way, the the
Dan: Yes.
Dave: you mentioned Michael Pollan a few minutes ago Uh our book club read five years ago six years ago his amazing book Uh, that's called "How To Change Your Mind."
And it's about hallucinogenics
Dan: and
Yeah, sure, the mushroom book. Yep, I've got it. Mm hmm, mm
Dave: Psilocybin and he does that thing that Michael Pollan does so extremely well, which is he [00:12:00] digs deep into the history of it. And, uh, he actually came and spoke at Purdue within about six months of our, uh, book club reading that book. one of the things you, you find out when you read his book about the, the sort of circuitous route that came to the point where all. Hallucinogenic drugs just were outlawed as a matter of principle by the United States government, but that's, the pendulum is swinging back the other way on those as well and has in some states, but it's a really interesting read because what you find out is one of the historical uses for those hallucinogenics and specifically psilocybin was as a really effective treatment. For alcoholism and for other addictions and for post traumatic stress disorder and extremely effective. And then, of course, when the whole thing happened with, Harvard Medical School when they were looking into hallucinogenics and then the Food and Drug Administration [00:13:00] just wildly reacted.
But that Michael Pollan book, "How to Change Your Mind" I've never been disappointed by any of the books of his that I've read ever.
Dan: No. No, indeed. Indeed. Indeed, indeed.
Dave: years ago as we were trying to do prep for "Rustle The Leaf" was "Second Nature." And to get
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: both, scientifically valid, well researched, and historically valid, kind of approach to really does it mean when you say an indigenous species? What does that mean?
Dan: Yes,
Dave: of the
Dan: yes.
Dave: are we talking about? And so many other things that he wrote about, but yeah, some really interesting
Dan: Of all of the books that we read, doing that, of all doing the Rustle The Leaf podcast. 'cause I was reading hundreds of pages of environmental science a week. I mean, we, I, we read Silent Spring, I read Environmentalism for Dummies. I read several books on nuclear power and nuclear waste and those sorts of things.
And I, I knew about. I knew about mining heavy metals out of the [00:14:00] ground because of some of those books and the environmental impact of some of those things, but his book was the sole book that was hopeful and and his line that the garden is the place where the relationship between man and the land is mutually beneficial.
And it was like, what a seminal thing for him to say. If you're looking for hope, there it is. All you have to do is care for and tend the land to its health, We garden here. It's always just tomatoes now and it's over for this season, but managing the soil health
it's really what you're doing. You're managing the microbiology that's going on here because that's the health of the plant, like eating right and going to the gym or any of those other sorts of things that the plant. And the plant gets more delicious. So if you're a hedonist,Managing the soil health really has meant more delicious tomatoes, which I like how that can be connected on a large scale on a small scale.
Dave: highly enough all those [00:15:00] Michael Pollan books. They're just so interesting and engaging and often really funny as well.
Dan: He can go from a four letter expletive to quoting Emerson in one paragraph. Like, wow, I love him.
Dave: it's a,
at least for me, anyway,
Dan: Right?
Dave: segue into AI. I came across something in a Reddit post the other day that I shared with you, it's from 1855. It's from "Punch". magazine, andit's essentially a political cartoon. That's making fun of early photography. And I will post this in the timeline of the show because it's, it's
Dan: All right.
Dave: entertaining. And basically what it shows is a family, a complex family. There's babies, there's multiple adults, there's kids, and they're posing for This picture. And then what they show as the actual photograph is the way things happened in [00:16:00] with early photography. So everybody's face is smeared. The baby is crying instead of actually looking like it's smiling. And the point that they're making is, Hey, if you use an illustrator or a portrait artist, the way you're supposed to versus using this awful technology, you'll get the family portrait that you want. And it's just so funny to see that because That's the issue that we're talking
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: good? Is it bad? It does. Who does it replace? Whose job does it take away? And suddenly. Photography comes along and all of those people that had studied art and portraiture and illustration and making, portraits of families that you could then produce using,lithography. All of that stuff starts getting replaced by photography, but who can look back in history and go, Oh, yeah, our decision to allow photography was a real big mistake to humankind.
it's like the joke I made about movable type. It's the same idea.
Dan: Right.
Dave: and inevitably they [00:17:00] do replace people. And processes that are part of the current construct. They just do, and they will. And, uh, so anyway, as we continue to explore AI stuff, one of the things that happens with me now is in my Instagram feed and Facebook and other social media feeds, I am now gettingCreators who are building out their presence online as resources for, here's this new AI that came along this week and here are the features.
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: And two weeks
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: and we teased this at the end of the show last week,
it's an experimental tool. called NotebookLM from Google. And here's the basic idea of NotebookLM. Imagine having a notebook. That's the metaphor. And you're in a class about something. Pick a subject, whatever it is. And you're taking notes about it.
Maybe you have a pocket in the notebook, and you put some other documents in there. But this notebook is the repository for everything that you're trying to learn about a specific subject. [00:18:00] And that metaphor is exactly right. It is, you could go find scholarly articles on a website, and can go your own information about something.
You can copy and paste text into it, but essentially what NotebookLM is. It is a digital repository for information, and it treats all of that information as if the notebook AI that's behind it, that's managing it, a, research tool. And so creates FAQs, it creates question and answer quizzes, it creates summaries and briefs from whatever resources you give it. And the number of resources you give it is limited. the amount of words that you can paste into a document to have added as a resource is limited. But essentially what happens, and I'm going to share the screen and show you what the interface looks like, it becomes a place. [00:19:00] Where it produces processes and tools for better learning, bullet points, study guides, all of that kind of thing. and none of that is terribly exciting, it's pretty cool that you can, you know, feed it a bunch of resources and have it summarize those things for you.
Dan: If I were managing a college, I would be shaking in some of my boots.
Dave: thing about what they're trying to do with this is they're really trying to go, every single thing that it gives you back as a piece of study or information, it has a citation Yeah. so that's why, this actually becomes the kind of tool that for academic use is way more credible than just, I went to chat GPT and then ran its
Dan: Right.
Dave: filter to try to mask that it came from the AI. So that when I send that in as a term paper, I believe it's accurate and it may be filled with inaccuracies. What NotebookLM is doing and actually Stanford [00:20:00] university just this week, I found out. has published a publicly usable, much less sizzly version of this idea. And I'll share that in a moment too.
But here's why NotebookLM freaked everybody out. Because in addition to it providing this sort of way of synthesizing information and creating study guides and other information that are cited, the other thing that it does, one of the ways that it would summarize the information was by writing a fake podcast script having fake AI voices talk about the subject. I'm going to share my screen really quickly and then in a
Dan: Okay.
Dave: some of
Dan: All right.
Dave: but here is
Dan: Okay.
Dave: looks like. for NotebookLM. Uh, so I'm sharing it now and hopefully it will show up in the recording. I can see it. I think you can see it. So what's
Dan: can't.
Dave: and I'm going to switch [00:21:00] over here just to sort of nose around in here. As you can see over here on the left, the sources that I've given it. So one of the things that I've given. Given it is all of the transcripts for every it might be robot podcast that we've done. So you can click on that and you can see here's the gas station barbecue one from last week and you can see that that transcript is in there and the AI has done a summary of it and it's even given it key topics related to how it's going to prepare a study guide for that show. And then over here you can see these are notes that have been saved and you can see this and this is really important. It says here, seven citations. So here's a saved note that's basically a summary of what this is about. And this is based on all of the information that I've given it. So I've given it our transcriptions, but I've also given it the website.
It might be robots. com, because there's some other information there as well. And you can see, as I open [00:22:00] these notes, here is an episode 1 through 6 study guide. Remember, this is a notebook, and it gives you the answers. And it even gives you at the bottom a glossary of terms, which talks both about, you know, AI tools that we're using, but also about just some general topics, as if the person who is studying this has no idea.
All right? And it even gives you suggestions for things. So I'm going to pop up this notebook guide now, and you can see here. Well, let's look at the FAQ for this. And so what's happening right now is the AI is thinking about it and it's going to generate a frequently asked questions, kind of a study tool to help with learning about the, it might be robots podcast. and what I'm going to do now, and it's weird, I haven't figured out the interface where the screen share. So there it is. It might be robots podcast FAQ. What is it? Who are Dave Ponce and Dan Wright? What sparked the idea? How did they use AI? What are some challenges? So again, It feels like a [00:23:00] digital notebook I'll go back and look at that again.
And you can see in here. That it's got all of these nice listings for what's going on and if you go in and look at the
Dan: Well, could you go back please? Who does it say we are? Like, I want, I want, like that one, I know the answer to that one, so.
Dave: and creative
Dan: Wow,
Dave: with over 30 years of experience working together Dave primarily works as an advertising copywriter and creative director with extensive experience in video and audio He's also a songwriter a musician Dan comes from a cartooning and comedic performance background working as a visual communicator and artist.
He's also a musician with a particular interest in gypsy jazz guitar.
Dan: this robot gets an A. Ha
Dave: again,
Dan: ha ha ha.
Dave: to show you, I'm going to pop up this little guide down here at the bottom. By the way, all of the chat that I've had with the robot, let me click on that. um, oh, well, you know what that chat isn't presently available, which is kind of interesting.
I think it maybe
Dan: [00:24:00] Oh.
Dave: of days, but it lets you have all these saved notes. But the other thing I want
Dan: Okay.
Dave: over here, Dan, is it says click to load the conversation and. Audio overview, and I'm going to load this conversation right now. This, the formatting for it, the style of it is as if these two people who are talking about, it might be robots podcasters and while that's loading, I'm going to actually play you some of this because I can't really figure
Dan: Okay. Alright.
Dave: Here's
Dan: Okay.
Dave: these two people sound like talking about the, It Might Be Robots podcast. Ever feel like AI is kind of, you know, sneaking up on us? Yeah, definitely. Today we're diving into AI and creativity with, uh, Dave and Dan from the It Might Be Robots podcast.
Right. They're looking at how AI is changing things up for artists and musicians and maybe even, you know, Podcasters like us, us, exactly. And trust me, some of their experiences will really make you think [00:25:00] so let's jump right in. Yeah. It's, it's funny how we talk about it. Now, let me just say this two weeks ago when I did this, by the way, I'm still sharing the screen here so I can show you this. You have options
Dan: huh.
Dave: tell the AI just like as if you were asking it to draw a picture for you in DALL-E. You
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: up or a thumbs down. You can share
Dan: Okay.
Dave: And again, this is
Dan: Right.
Dave: so it's somewhere in a Google drive. can download this conversation. You can delete it. So I have downloaded one of the original versions of this. Uh, this one you can see in here that's loaded up is 24
Dan: Ha ha ha.
Dave: minutes. The first one of these that I did that you heard about a week and a half ago, Dan was only
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: nine minutes long and they were not referring to themselves as podcasters. So just. In the two weeks. what I did was I have three versions of their summaries.
And what I do is I download the one that they've done, [00:26:00] I delete it. And
Dan: Uh huh. Uh huh. then download and delete it and.
Dave: this is the third of these and it's 24 minutes long. And I was saying to Dan, when we were talking about this yesterday, what happens is it's very much like working in mid journey, where all of a sudden the prompts seem to not matter anymore. And it starts to get unfocused and it starts to throw weird things in. That's exactly what happens with these podcasts and NotebookLM. You can see that this is now up to 24 minutes. Once upon a time, it was a nine minute summary. And I can tell you, it was, it was crispy and crunchy and had meaning. And in this 24 minute podcast, these two podcasters and the script that's been generated, just they meander, they repeat each other.
They say the same exact phrases back and forth. That's really odd. It's like, Oh, well, by the time you've asked for a third or fourth generation of the same data starts going, well, I don't know what you want. I gave you that first [00:27:00] one. Okay. You may want something different. And so it does that. And I'll just play a little more of this because it really is compelling to hear some of this and I'll skip around.
Hang on. AI is if it's this like just remixing right? Is it really original existing material? And you know, And what does that mean? Copyright, you know in the age of AI Huge questions. It's a lot. Yes. It's a lot to unpack. It's almost like asking, like, what makes us human? Right. If, if machines can just do what we do, like faster and better in a lot of cases.
And often even better. Yeah. And, and if an AI can just, you know, pump out a catchy jingle, that devalue the work of actual musicians? That's the question, isn't it? Right. It's a tough one. It's a real head scratcher. It is. And this is where this like. So again, Dan, right? Right.
Dan: Like, all of the, like us humans, like, that is [00:28:00] so marvelous that that builds that in.
Dave: just telling you, man, uh, really interesting that, and, and the hook that got me to dig into it two weeks ago was one of these, you know, people that are building out an Instagram channel to get viewers and monetize it. The hook that they used to get me to watch it was, Did Google just kill podcasting? So, and I was
Dan: Yeah.
Dave: trying to get a podcast going here with Dan. Let me go find out what this means. And intNotebookLMLM I went,
Okay, I was gonna ask you, you think for right now, it's free. Eventually, it's not going to be free.
reason I say that is that's what Google has done with Gemini. I mean, what started out
Dan: Okay.
Dave: as Google Bard that was free to Google account users. You were in the queue, like with a lot of free text to image applications, where if you are in an unpaid account, it's going to go slow, or they may limit the number of times you can use it every day. And as you get into different payment tiers, it goes faster. You get more use, et cetera. [00:29:00] So my belief is that what's going to happen with. This product is it's going to go through that kind of testing and seeing how people use it and it's going to make those kind of improvements. For example, right now it says on that podcast, fake podcast creation, right now it's only in English and it's only with those two voices.
Well, you know where that's going to go. It's going to go into multiple languages. It's going to go into podcasters that maybe can be your own voice synthesized. And, and that's why that guy's hook did Google just kill podcasting. He may not be that far off in some ways, because the truth is that's a pretty credible sounding human conversation. And it, it is really remarkable. And so of course, what you, I think eventually where this tool will go. Is you'll be able to look at the transcript that it created. You'll be able to edit or delete things out of that and have it remanufacture That discussion and [00:30:00] in that kind of world once again Do you ever then have to go pay hundreds of dollars for microphones?
Do you ever have you know what I mean? No, you really don't it. It doesn't mean it's inauthentic It just means that you can set it up in a way that kicks down further technology and time barriers. And again, the basis of all of it is this idea that it is cited from the sources that you give it.
And so here's an example of what NotebookLM then does. it's talking about it might be robots. It is giving you narrative about the sources that I've given it, but in that podcast, if you were to listen to all of it, there are generalizations about AI that are not part of that source material. And that is Google going to Gemini to fill in the blanks and add context to this specific topic. And that's really what NotebookLM does. Oh, you want to learn about. Early cameras from the 1850s. From to [00:31:00] 1875, post Civil War, you want to learn about what cameras were used in the field, okay? It's going to take all the source material that you have found about it, maybe even your own research paper, but it is going to fill in other blanks from looking at its own large language model. And that podcast that it creates, or maybe even its study guide that it creates, will have a citation for this other website that it went to. Now, I don't want to get too geeky about this, Dan. Here now is an example that I will share of an actual program that's just been introduced by Stanford University that is more Credible in terms of its scholarly approach and it's an amazing thing Let me show the screen here really quickly.
this is again Stanford University I just heard about it through one of these same kind of resources that I hear about now and then as is often the case with me i'm like man, I want to go find out about this and I we were doing a podcast or not. I would be doing this because I just Deeply [00:32:00] interested in this and in learning and I'm strongly motivated to figure out ways to be more accurate and to save time and to ramp up work product or whatever it is that I'm trying to do. So here now I'll share my screen and let me change the tab here. Um, so this is called STORM what you're going to see in this screen share is, um, a topic that I gave STORM. And then we'll, we'll, you know, kind of chat about it for a moment. So hopefully you can see this and what, what we're looking at here is the Stanford university pilot model of STORM is what they've called it. You can choose a new session, but I'm logged in through my Google account and I've asked it to give me. Uh, just a paper, if you will, about public domain Jazz Standards. So you can see here that I can choose to show this as a PDF document if I want to, but I want you to see [00:33:00] how this is built. All right. So it is a summary. It is a history. And then it starts going through how it really believes. What I've asked it for should be presented to me. And you can see here that there are citations throughout. This does not allow you, at least as what I've seen so far, this doesn't allow you to put in your own sources. This is using the World Wide Web and Stanford University's libraries. to do this. So it's using Stanford's language model, whichever one they're tapped into, and it's using their own resources to create this, okay? And you can see all those citations in there. But here's what's really cool. In these examples of notable compositions for public domain jazz standards, you see these citations here where it's giving you the name of the author, giving you the year that it was published, etc. So, This is a really cool kind of very useful summary. If you have some information [00:34:00] and you can give it feedback. I want to point this out, Dan, because this is mind blowing to me. What STORM does is it creates personalities. And I'll show you what it calls them for this. My ask was what I really asked it for was I want to know in with public domain jazz standards, here's what I want to know. I want to know if there are some structural similarities to how those songs were written. And I want to know if there were some topical similarities to how those were written. And then it asks you for one follow up question. STORM says to you, well, why, what do you hope to get as a result from this thesis? And you have to give it a little bit of a description. And then off it goes and does its work. So I haven't, to be fair, I haven't really fully read all of this, but I skimmed it and thought, well, it didn't really give me what I asked it for, but it's given me some pretty good information here, but here's what it did to provide [00:35:00] all of this information. created four robot personalities to do it. And you can see this, it's called the brainSTORMing process. So I want you to notice. the basic FactWriter robot, and you can see what it asked, and you can see what its large, its large language model gave as answers. Here is a copyright expert. So in those citations where it was talking about, this is in the public domain, here's the author. It's giving you those citations coming from a legal perspective. Again, this is a university application no doubt is designed to help students not just put BS into their writing, you know, then you can see another robot as a musicologist and another one is a historian of jazz. so it's using that combination of those robot personalities, to build out this paper. And to give [00:36:00] me all of the citations that it found from the World Wide Web. And when you watch it happen,
If you leave it up live on the screen you see in real time Websites come up and you see library citations come up and they're all urls that it's going to And you just see them
Dan: Wow.
Dave: your screen as it's having these conversations.
So, I see the, the STORM application with Stanford and I see NotebookLM as these are the managers and creators and users at scale of artificial intelligence going. "All right, one of the things we're learning early on is this can be inaccurate. It's not trustworthy. People can put things out there that aren't true. What can we do to add guardrails?" And if you're a university program, this is a really great response. It is "No, let's admit that you're going to use Google search and other AI tools to try to help you write your paper.
Let's admit that, let's make sure that you don't create a circumstance where somebody expels you because of plagiarism or because of [00:37:00] inaccuracy."
What do you do with this kind of technology and frankly this kind of power? you go, "Let's figure out ways to continue using it for good."
I think the idea that I mean bluntly I think the idea that it's controllable is naive.
Dan: I don't think it can be controlled. I think it's up to the individual to use it well.
it's one more of those. This is like hiring a team of creative people.
Dave: I see the value in that NotebookLM tool more now than I did before you and I started talking this morning.
I'm excited about seeing, entrepreneurs and other entities come to this with, the admission that it's going to be here rather
Dan: Yeah,
Dave: let's abandon this altogether,
Dan: I've heard other creative people be of the mind that, "Oh, I want nothing to do with that," which I think is short sighted. I think it's exactly the Punch cartoon that you showed. Is exactly that.
to say no to the technology [00:38:00] because you've not tried it, It's naive and short sighted and professionally, I lose respect for creative people that don't have the I'm gonna say sense of adventure to get in there and try it out.
Dave: Yeah
I think I told you the story about working at an advertising agency in 1984 and 85 and 86 and trying to introduce the art director who was a university professor. I was trying to introduce him to Macintosh technology and to what it could mean for the throughput of comps for clients. Now this is an agency with serious Fortune 200 kinds of business to business accounts. And was like I was showing him a vial of disease. you could see his visceral reaction.
And, and he wanted zero to do with it because he had really become good at doing marker comps and a drawing fonts by hand that look like the fonts. [00:39:00] And he's absolutely uninterested in this. and for me, it's that same reaction, Dan, I lost quite a bit of respect for him over it because it's like, by the time it's to the point where you and I can get in the car and go to the computer store and buy one of these. How are you contending for the idea that this should go away and that it's not something that's proven and valid? It's like, that got
Dan: yes.
Dave: a long time ago. Now
Dan: Yes. Yes.
Dave: how can I better prepare my students and how can I more fully serve my clients and my agency being
Dan: Yes.
Dave: job with this technology? I, and, and again, it's the debate that goes on every single time a new piece of technology comes on the scene. You have the
Dan: Yeah, right
Dave: interest in deciding they don't want it.
Dan: And here's what I wanted to say about that. Yes, you absolutely, You have at scale succeeded at it on really the national [00:40:00] marketplace with a syndicated comic strip. You have learned to draw in a way that the style of it, the intellect of it, the preciousness of it is unique. And you've applied those skills to succeed in that scale. To me, that is a skill set and a group of practices and sketchbooks filled with how to hone your craft that are all valid. But I think it's not any less valid to go have a notebook filled with skills that I have used for my craft for prompting, a different way of doing it. The dichotomy that I heard that I love that I still return to I got from a book on pottery and this author said The dichotomy was the workmanship of risk versus the workmanship of certainty And I still carry that around with me because I find value in that if you are painting something It's a concrete thing it exists in [00:41:00] reality the next choice of brushstroke that you make might Destroy this
Dave: And Of course you can use the computer to, to express yourself and to curate an experience for somebody else to have, of course you can. Can you use the computer to make art?
Dan: philosophically I'm gonna line up with the people who say, of course you can.
It's one more tool.
Dave: but it, you know, it exists in digital space, not physical space until it gets printed out somewhere. But I don't, you know, again, if you just objectively look at it and go, both of these are somebody's artistic expression, just using different media.
Dan: well one of the ways that you would look at that is. show me a digital reproduction Of anything because show me a digital first off that you that got created that sells at christie's for millions
Dave: what occurred to me just now in thinking about this and talking about it, was there ever a point when Jackson Pollock looked at a finished canvas and went, "No, THAT'S not right." "
Dan: a lot of cool stuff going on, Dan [00:42:00] and, um, more to come, this is the, "It Might Be Robots" podcast. I'm Dave Ponce. And I'm Dan Wright.
Dave: See you, Dan...
Dan: Okay. Bye.
