AI digests repetitive scatological document into profound “poop” podcast

In one particularly long (and misleadingly anthropomorphizing) bit of padding, one host goes on a tangent about “walking downtown” and joyfully stumbling on a shop filled with “rubber ducks dressed as historical figures.” The hosts try to connect this back to the poop-fart document by discussing how approaching the world with “curiosity and humor can lead to interesting places, even if those places are filled with… well, you know.”

It’s not exactly a convincing comparison. Then again, we shouldn’t exactly be shocked that NotebookLM is forced to BS its way through its podcasting task here. And it’s not like the poop-fart document offers Shakespeare-levels of subtext ripe for deeper analysis, after all. We’re asking the model to make something from nothing here, and that’s exactly what it is doing.

In other words, if AI models are the ultimate BS machines, I was impressed just how much bullshit NotebookLM was able to generate here without any firm starting point to start shoveling from.

“Sometimes a poop is just a poop and a fart is just a fart.”

NotebookLM

Critics of generative AI will often say that it’s just “glorified autocomplete” or a massive plagiarism engine that subtly rewords content culled from its training data. And you could argue that NotebookLM’s poop-fart podcast is just spitting back a version of some dime-store philosophy it read somewhere else on the Internet.

Still, I was impressed with how well the model could spin up this mini-treatise on human nature from the most inane of starting points. It’s one thing to have a summarization engine that can take important bits from complex documents and turn them into an entertaining, podcast-like synopsis. It’s another to hear that same engine take nothing but “poop” and “fart” and spin it into 10 minutes of pseudo-intellectual analysis that was nowhere to be found in the source itself.

The complex, algorithmic web of neural links buried in a modern AI model can lead to some pretty surprising places. That’s even more true when the starting point for that meandering path of links is a meaningless scatological joke.