(2023-12-08) Levy Google's NotebookLM Aims To Be The Ultimate Writing Assistant

Steven Levy: Google’s NotebookLM aims to be the ultimate writing assistant. For over a year now, Steven Johnson's been a full-time employee of Google, a status that’s clear when he badges me into the search giant’s Chelsea offices in New York to show me what his team has been creating.

It’s called NotebookLM, and the easiest way to think of it is as an AI collaborator with access to all your materials that sits on your metaphorical shoulder to guide you through your project

Johnson found his way to Google by way of a lifelong obsession with software as a “a dynamic thought partner,” a tool to speed up and enhance the creative process.

When Johnson got access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator in 2021, he recognized that AI could level up a new generation of thought tools (tools for thought).

In May 2022, a small team in the experimental Google Labs division cold-emailed Johnson

"You know, this thing you've been chasing your whole life? We can finally build it,"" Johnson says. He became a part-time adviser to the small team, at first sharing the workflow of a professional writer

Eventually Johnson got involved in the development of the product itself and was sucked in to the point of accepting a full-time gig. His title at Google Labs is editorial director.

Right after you enter the sources, NotebookLM seems to arrive at its own opinions of what’s important about the topic and can suggest questions for you to ask it and themes to explore

But here’s my worry. Users of NotebookLM, who simply want to get a good job done quickly might not take the time to do that hard work of thinking. They might not even bother to pore through the research materials themselves. Why take the time when your AI buddy has gone through the material

Johnson doesn’t seem as worried about this as I am. First of all, he notes that users are under no obligation to engage in conceptual discourse with the app: They can happily use it for things like finding that passage where someone’s title is identified and things like that. But he clearly feels it’s a tremendous advantage to engage in such dialog

you can even use a mode where NotebookLM can critique your work and argue the opposite side

After spending the entire year of 2023 writing and thinking about AI, I can now summarize my key concern, more succinctly than NotebookLM might. Our future will be characterized by a tension between copilot (AI as collaborator) and autopilot (humans as sidekick to AI). The latter is more efficient and cheaper in a narrow labor economics sense but troublesome in all sorts of ways.