Nate's Blog

I haven't really used Google's NotebookLM since I toyed around with it last year, but I logged in the other day and realized they added a lot of new features to it – including a video generation option. I'm pretty late to the party, looks like it was added at the very end of July 2025, but it's new to me so I'm going to talk about it anyway.

The core of Notebook LM still remains the same: add sources in just about any form (documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc) and you can ask it questions or have it summarize the content. You can achieve similar results with a local LLM using RAG, but Notebook LM doesn't require technical know how to setup or a dedicated GPU. The only other feature I remember it having was a generic “podcast” generation, which while neat in theory, I didn't really see any uses for myself.

I might do a longer in depth post about it's various features sometime in the future, but for now I just wanted to share the video itself:

I generated the video with no prompt or guidance; I created a notebook, added this post as a source, and hit generate video. Honestly, I'm surprised at how well videos worked. It's no masterpiece, but it feels like it's escaped the orbit of AI slop and reached the level of generic human made YouTube slop. Though I'm sure being an AI summary of a human written text was a big part of it.

Anyway, I guess keep an eye out for that specific artificial voice on YouTube and similar platforms. I have a feeling that NotebookLM has/will be a major source of video slop.

I'm experimenting with what I've deemed a 'mini blog' – smaller posts and different mediums separate from normal posts, while experimenting with different platforms/protocols, all linked together via a page and RSS link. If you want to see more you can follow here.