Google’s NotebookLM Podcast Generator Gets It Wrong
After Andrew Byrne’s LinkedIn post about him generating a podcast about his career using Google’s NotebookLM, I wondered if I could generate a podcast based on my first novel, Hell on $5 A Day.
Being the author and knowing the story intimately may have made me too sensitive to the errors, but there were some serious errors and hallucinations. For example, the hosts keep saying Vietnam when what they were talking about occurred in the forests of France. In fact, NONE of the story takes place in Vietnam. The word “Vietnam” is not in the book.
They call Mammon “the devil” when he’s the demon of greed and we do *eventually* encounter Lucifer (my version, not Neil Gaiman’s). They also credit him with a reaction that happens in a different encounter with a different demon.
That said, I did enjoy the overall podcast and the takes on the things it got right were interesting. For something entirely generated by AI, I wouldn’t have known it wasn’t real if I just heard it on the radio.
