I fed Google's new Notebook Summary feature my article about the potential dangers of AI scraping and it's as scary and self-aware as you'd think

Yes, I know, it's a bit hypocritical to be critical of AI, especially generative AI, and use it like some kind of nasty party trick. However, I'm a journalist and it's kind of like doing science. Google Notebook LM, Google's AI summarization system, has a new audio summarization control feature that focuses on specific topics and sources and is both quite intelligent and immersive.

Announced today, Google Labs, the search company's AI tools site, has implemented this latest addition and users can test it for themselves. I wanted to give him some more nuanced information, but I know it quite well so it's hard to find a better choice than what you wrote.

I handed him an article I wrote earlier today critical of AI data scraping opt-out policies, and watched as two moderators summarized it to help me take notes make. Aside from calling it an “opt-OUT” model, it gets to the point.

The two AI moderators manage to get to my basic opinion in a roundabout way and it seems as if they are seriously and thoughtfully criticizing the very thing that brought them to life in the first place (data scraping). It then argues that users should use their data more proactively and that not all hope is lost in the AI data war.

In the second interpretation of the same article, I asked the AI moderators to focus a little more on Elon Musk and his controversies, just to see how far they would go beyond my article.

Aside from a little annoyance over Musk's name, it continues to focus on the same basic point and even makes mistakes in speech patterns, such as saying “X” and then calling it “Twitter.” Every now and then “um” and “ah” fit in, which looks surprisingly lifelike.

We noticed a lot of these things when testing the Podcast feature earlier this month, but the Notebook feature takes it a step further because you can ask it more questions around the article. I asked him about the basic arguments in my article and he gave a succinct four-point answer in which he addressed some of the reasons for being critical of data scraping and in particular the problems with opt-out policies.

When I repeated it a second time, I noticed some similarities, such as the male presenter calling AI companies deceitful in both versions. The presenter also says twice on the second attempt: “The future will be shaped by the now.”

However, I find the confidence with which the hosts speak worrying. There's a feedback loop here where you can always have a professional-sounding moderator tell you “the truth” about a source you shared. In the case of my article, whether you agree or not, my argument is relatively simple.

There are a few little bits of information misunderstood, like requiring company owners to log out when they are actually users, but it's mostly about money. How does something like this prepare a potential reader for something deeper and more philosophical?

And what makes authors keep writing when their work can be summarized by two very friendly voices who can position the information the way the reader wants? Fundamentally, our ability to understand the words in front of us requires much greater skill than the ability to read an AI's summary, and language is so diverse that we shouldn't trust it to get everything right.

As I said at the beginning, it feels like a scary party trick, but the language feels so much bigger than an LLM, however big, can really understand.

I fed Google's new Notebook Summary feature my article about the potential dangers of AI scraping and it's as scary and self-aware as you'd think

ByVanessa

By Vanessa

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