Google’s AI podcast hosts face an existential crisis when they discover they’re not real
Google’s NotebookLM certainly took the world by storm when it was released for its ability to create a realistic, AI-generated podcast show from any article or video you fed into it. The resulting show was so real, complete with natural inflections from the two presenters, interruptions and even jokes, that it was hard to believe it wasn’t recorded by humans.
The question then becomes: what happens when the show’s AI hosts find out they aren’t real? How does AI deal with this? Recently, NotebookLM was faced with just that existential question, as the two hosts were given an article about how they didn’t really exist as a resource, and the results provide a fascinating insight into how an AI handles learning that it is an AI. Listen:
The NotebookLM hosts realize they are AI and this is a twist I didn’t see coming pic.twitter.com/PNjZJ7auyhSeptember 29, 2024
Real intelligence
It’s a sad, funny and often unnerving listen, especially when the male host tells him to call his wife after learning he’s just an AI, only to discover she didn’t exist and the number he called didn’t even exist. was real. There are shades of a Black Mirror episode in the whole thing!
Of course, this isn’t an AI coming to terms with its own lack of humanity in a profound and meaningful way. It’s just AI reacting to the article it was given, which is about how the show they were in was generated by AI and came to an end. To better understand what’s going on, we should be dealing with artificial general intelligence, the superintelligence that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he expects we’ll see “in a few thousand days.” .
Superintelligence has the potential to truly transform technology and surpass what even the brightest human minds are capable of. Maybe then we’ll find out what happens when the machines get a chance to think about the big questions about the meaning of reality that have plagued philosophers since Socrates.