Not Made by the Hands of Men

Breaking news! A new podcast of Pedro de Bruyckere and my article The myths of the digital native and the multitasker has been made! This podcast was, however, not made by an education blogger or institution, was not made by Pedro or me, but was made by an AI-app. As Pedro tweeted: …in 8 minutes, you really get the essence of our article, and it becomes even more useful for a broad audience.

In the past few days, people like Carl Hendrick and Daniel Willingham alerted me to a new AI-application called Google NotebookLM. Google calls it “a personalized AI collaboration tool that helps optimize your thinking process. After you upload your documents, NotebookLM instantly becomes an expert on these resources. So you can read the documents, take notes, and collaborate with NotebookLM to refine and organize your ideas.”

What it also does is make a podcast about the document and it does that amazingly well. I tried it out with three articles, one of which was in Dutch, and the results were a tad short of phenomenal. It sounds real, hits the target most of the time, sometimes hallucinates, and uses the word ‘exactly’ far too often!

Here the podcast: