My friend Garrick recently shared about Two AI Bots Discussing His Work — a test he did using Google’s Notebook LM. I listened to the three recordings that he shared and it was incredible.

I had to try this myself so I fired up Notebook LM and decided to throw some issues of the Weekly Thing at it. The results were interesting to say the least!

292 / Signal, Checkboxes, Hope

Notes:

  • I found the beginning of this super interesting. It just jumps right into the privacy topic and for some reason even pulls in bee keeping which seems strangely connected to other things.
  • The AI really got focused on the featured article about Section 230 and ignores everything else in this issue. There is a good chunk of writing in here about GTD that is entirely ignored.
  • The bots totally understand what Section 230 is.
  • It cracked me up when the AI’s highlight quotes.
  • I found it odd that it mostly pronounces my last name right, but gets it wrong one time.

287 / Plinky, Piccolo, Privacy

Notes:

  • This one starts out with a much more traditional podcast introduction, even using a title “The Deep Dive”. Very different from what it did on the other ones.
  • The bots talking about stackless interpreters is pretty funny.
  • This one works hard to cover all the various things in the newsletter and kind of rambles on.

276 / Contextual, Copilot, Collections

Notes:

  • This issue includes the dates that it covers in the header, and the AI clearly sees that and makes an intentional reference to this being somewhat old. “Back in February 2024…”
  • The Apple Vision Pro “Ahh, yes. It was all the rage back then.”
  • “This guy is writing the user manual for the future.” Okay!
  • Even the bots poke fun at blockchain. “Obsessed with the idea of decentralization.” 😂
  • It is curious to me that in this one there are more references to “this guy” and “the author”. It doesn’t seem to know who I am like it does in the others.
  • I love the “totally random” reference to the blog post about the Minneapolis Downtown Council. The bots can’t help but try to connect it to the rest of the content, which it isn’t at all. But it does make one up! Apparently I’m connecting urban planning to digital spaces.

Multiple Issues

At this point I was pretty impressed and intrigued by what this was doing. I wanted to try something with more content so this time I uploaded 14 recent issues of the Weekly Thing into the notebook and told it to generate. I was curious what it would do with this much material! This one has an entirely different structure.

Notes:

  • The bots cover a lot of ground but focus a lot on the variety of topics.
  • It is goofy to me when the AI says to the other one “I think I remember that one…” Huh?
  • It thinks I switched my whole blog to a web3 platform, which I didn’t. Not sure how it got that.
  • “He’s grounded.” If I want some compliments I’ll just listen to this. 😊
  • “Jamie doesn’t shy away from any topic. He even went deep on cryptocurrency.”