Category: AI

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The magic of NotebookLM (and my first podcast)

One of the more practical and super easy to use AI tools I’ve seen is NotebookLM, where one can add documents, text, websites, and more to a notebook and then tell AI to do something with all of the content. I’ve found this incredibly handy for things like adding a link to a keg distributor and telling it “create a list of all beers categorized by style of beer and sorted by ABV” (don’t judge). This is ~30 minutes of work accomplished in less than a minute.

One of the features of NotebookLM is the ability to make a podcast out of the content. I did this for the first time and… holy crap, it’s amazeballs.

One of my more popular (and plagiarized) postings is Causes of Backpacking and Hiking Deaths, so I decided to try the “make a podcast” feature. I’m… blown away. First, I encourage you to read the original post, and then listen to the NotebookLM created podcast:

To be clear, I gave no other direction… I added the website and clicked the “make podcast” button.

So, the obvious thing would be “sure, Brett… it’s taking your content and summarizing”. But that’s the magic, it’s not! So much of the commentary comes across as observations that are not mentioned in the original post. For example, my post mentions that hiking is more dangerous than skydiving, but the podcast makes the observation it is because we feel more comfortable in that unsafe situation. AI also picks up that this is obviously a humorous take on the dangers.

The AI podcast also extrapolates what was in the blog post, where I mentioned the danger of temperatures (hot and cold), and the podcast adds the phenomenon “paradoxical undressing” (never mentioned in my post), and the fact that with heat stroke you may not feel thirsty.

In talking about health issues, my post mentions the problems, the podcast comes up with ways to prepare for this possible risk. And while I mention the danger of too much water (drowning), the podcast highlights the risk of flash floods and canyons. None of that was in my post.

Following the summary of my post, the AI podcast hosts go into a dialog about how to protect yourself from all of these dangers. These include space blankets, lightning avoidance, and proper water treatment. None of that was in my post.

I’ve heard a few other of these podcasts where people take a ton of content and make an easy to consume podcast from it, and I have consistently been impressed. But even if you don’t need a podcast. I encourage you to take a look at NotebookLM and see if it can help you eliminate some of the more mundane tasks in your life… summarizing long documents, reformatting data from a website, or identifying insights.

For example. I uploaded the Unabomber Manifesto (again, don’t judge) and asked, ” show examples of contradictions in this manifesto”. Some of the insights included:

  • In the introduction, the manifesto states, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” However, the author also acknowledges that the Industrial Revolution has increased the life expectancy of those in “advanced” countries.
  • The author acknowledges that “primitive man is physically less secure than modern man,” but argues that modern man suffers from more insecurity because he lacks control over his environment. But, the author also argues that freedom, which the author defines as having “power…to control the circumstances of one’s own life,” will be increased if “the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM [is] broken.” It is unclear how the power of individuals can increase if the industrial system, which has given humans some power over nature, is destroyed.

And while these are not the deepest insights, they took less than 30 seconds of my time to surface from a relatively large document.

I highly recommend NotebookLM to everyone, especially anyone that doesn’t have much experience with AI. It’s really pretty simple to use and can make a lot of long, mundane tasks incredibly quick and simple.

Have you found a great use for NotebookLM or some other cool AI tool that is easy for anyone to start using? I’d like to hear about it, please leave a comment below!

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Make Yourself into an Anime Figurine with AI Image Generation

If you’ve ever wanted to see a figurine of yourself but you have no artistic talent, AI image generation can make that dream come true, and you can try it for free. I jump right into the “how to” and add my boring commentary to the end of this post, so you can skip it.

Brett, in real life

I’m using DALL-E for my image generation which requires a paid subscription, but you can get free access to it through Microsoft Bing Image Creator (requires a free Microsoft account). Once you have signed in, look for the text input field next to the two buttons “Create” and “Surprise Me”. The text field is where you describe what image you want AI to generate, then you click “Create” and a few seconds (or minutes) later, up to four images will be displayed. This process is called “prompting”, which is a common way to guide AI to generate the desired output. But getting AI to do exactly what you want is a little like herding drunk cats, so crafting the prompt can take some effort and some understanding of how things work under the hood. We’ll skip that for now and just start making fun things…

Anime figurine Brett with laptop and margarita

The structure for the prompt is “Anime figurine of <my description, skin tone, eye color, hairstyle, outfit>. The figurine is displayed inside a box with <text on box> and logo for the box, allowing visibility of the figure, typography, 3D render”. To make something that looks sort of like me, I used “Anime figurine of a shaved head, bald on top, nerd, white skin tone, dark gray hair, blue eye color, brown short beard, brown eyebrows, black shirt, jeans, Converse high tops, wearing blue rimmed glasses, wearing a watch, holding a laptop and a margarita. The figurine is displayed inside a box with Brett and logo for the box, allowing visibility of the figure, typography, 3D render“

AI reminding Brett of what he lost

Once you’ve tried this for yourself, you probably noticed a few things… Most obviously, somehow the AI didn’t do what you thought you told it. For example, while I prompted “bald on top“, one of my images clearly had hair, which might be the AI getting confused with the conflicting “dark gray hair” in the prompt. I have found replicating hairstyles, even bald hair styles (if… that’s a hair style?), can be challenging. I’ve yet to be able to get any consistency with hair only on the sides and back of the head. The other thing you will probably notice is the wild things that can show up in the image, especially when it comes to text generation, where AI tends to get… creative. Some of the words you use in your prompt may show up in the image, and misspelling is not uncommon.

Cheers!

There is considerable variation in the images, some looking more like the giant-headed Funko Pop figurines, and others having pretty realistic proportions. Prompting for another common outfit I wear, “Anime figurine of a shaved head, bald on top, nerd, white skin tone, dark gray hair, blue eye color, brown short beard, brown eyebrows, black shirt, tan pants, brown leather boots, wearing blue rimmed glasses, wearing a watch, holding a laptop and a pint of beer. The figurine is displayed inside a box with Brett and logo for the box, allowing visibility of the figure, typography, 3D render” created something a little more proportional.

Funko Pop Brett

So play around a little and see what you get… if anime isn’t your thing and you really love the Funko Pop style, try swapping out the prompt, “Funko style figurine of a shaved head, bald on top, nerd, white skin tone, dark gray hair, blue eye color, brown short beard, brown eyebrows, black shirt, jeans, Converse high tops, wearing blue rimmed glasses, wearing a watch, holding a laptop and a margarita. The figurine is displayed inside a box with Brett and logo for the box, allowing visibility of the figure, typography, 3D render“.

This gallery contains more examples:

Boring Commentary

A little over a year ago I wrote Robots Building Robots: AI Image Generation, where I used my laptop for AI image generation, meaning I had to use substantially less powerful AI models than are available in the cloud, where processing power and memory can be massive. The less powerful model was fine for the specific application I had in mind (a cartoon-like sketch of a robot for a sticker), but a few people commented that the quality of the AI images was average, and some were skeptical about AI’s capability.

In that same post, I mentioned Midjourney, which at the time version 4 was just coming out and already looking pretty amazing. In the 14 months since then, the quality and capability has continued to improve at an astonishing pace. For a detailed look at Midjourney specifically, check out this post from Yubin Ma at AiTuts. In less than two years, this model has gone from distorted human faces (some almost unrecognizable) to photo realism.

Female knight generated by Midjourney, V1 (Feb 2022), V4 (Nov 2022), V6 (Dec 2023), images from AiTuts
Vintage photo of girl smoking generated by Midjourney, V1 (Feb 2022), V4 (Nov 2022), V6 (Dec 2023), images from AiTuts

I have been surprised by both the rate at which the quality and the versatility of AI generated images has increased, with the anime figurines being one of the more recent (and delightful) examples of something AI can create unexpectedly well. I’m limiting this post to still image generation, but the same is happening for music, video, and even writing code (my last three hobby programming projects were largely created by AI). It’s reasonable to assume that AI will make substantial improvements to generating 3D image files, so soon you’ll be able to 3D print your cool little anime figurine.

There are, of course, significant implications of having computers provide a practical alternative to work that used to require humans, and much like the disappearance of travel agents once the Internet democratized access to booking travel, we should expect to see a dramatic reduction in demand for human labor, and this will be disruptive and upsetting… some professions will be nearly eliminated. I don’t want to be dismissive about the human impact of more powerful automation.

At the same time, AI can empower people, and create entirely new opportunities. Large language models (LLM) create the opportunity for customized learning, where eventually individuals all across the planet can have a dialog with an AI teacher, navigating millions of human years of knowledge. More and more, people will not be limited by their resources, they will only be limited by their ideas… The average person will be able to build a website, or a phone app by describing what they want, and someone considering themselves as “not artistic” will be able to create songs, artwork, or even movies that will eventually be box office quality. AI will also likely play a significant role in things like medical advances and energy efficiency, things we generally consider good for humans.

Did you enjoy making yourself into an anime figurine? Did you come up with a prompt that made a super cool image? Did you figure out how to get my male pattern baldness accurate on the figurine? This my hot take on being optimistic about AI is horrible? Leave a comment, below!