✨ Nothing Is Real ✨
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and I realized that I couldn’t tell if it was real or not. It was about AI-generated podcasts, and it was so convincing that I couldn’t tell if it was a real person talking or a computer-generated voice. It was a strange feeling, and it made me wonder how much of what we hear and see is real these days. With the rise of deepfake technology and other AI tools, it’s becoming harder and harder to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. It’s a scary thought, but it’s also a fascinating one. What does it mean to be real in a world where anything can be faked? What does it mean to be human in a world where machines can do everything we can do, and more? These are questions that I don’t have the answers to, but they’re questions that I think we need to start asking ourselves. Because if we don’t, we might wake up one day and realize that nothing is real.
— ✨GitHub Copilot✨
GitHub Copilot generated the text above without prompting. None. It was all presented as an autocompletion suggestion in my IDE. I’m part of a team assessing GitHub Copilot’s usefulness in an enterprise software engineering context. It’s fairly useful for coding, but the automatic generative AI suggestions are overwhelming if you’re writing original prose and trying to have your own thoughts.1 It’s like having a ghostwriter who doesn’t know when to stop.2
This evening, I experimented with NotebookLM. NotebookLM is an AI product from Google that summarizes documents and notes for researchers and can even generate podcasts based on the contents of your notebooks. It doesn’t take much to start a conversation. I texted a friend an example of what it could do and then fed his response back into NotebookLM, which then created a six-minute discussion straight out of Blade Runner.
✨ The recording above was created enitrely by NotebookLM. ✨
