Writing in the Age of AI: Steven Johnson Previews Google’s NotebookLM On This Week in Google

AI-created, human-edited.

The latest episode of This Week in Google provided an in-depth look at NotebookLM, Google's new AI-powered writing and research tool. Editorial Director Steven Johnson joined hosts Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau to demonstrate key capabilities and take questions on the emerging technology.

Johnson showcased how NotebookLM allows writers to upload documents, citations, and other source materials to create an AI-driven "second brain" to augment their work. By having a dialogue with the loaded corpus, the tool can provide summaries, suggest related questions to dig deeper, and gather relevant snippets onto a virtual noteboard for the writer to curate.

“It reminds me a little bit of when Wikipedia became useful...you can very quickly get a sense of the general state of some piece of information,” Johnson explained, noting the accelerated speed of research over traditional methods.

Future plans include incorporating images and videos and enabling device-based processing for privacy reasons. Despite privacy worries, hosts anticipate vast applications, from academic research to large-scale journalistic analysis. Laporte highlighted the infancy of AI's potential, envisioning future AI assistants synthesizing ideas but acknowledging the vast unknowns. The discussion illuminated the tool's transformative potential while recognizing the need for a nuanced balance between innovation and reliability in AI-driven research.

Become a subscriber and never miss an episode: This Week in Google