ChatGPT, NotebookLM, and Learning with AI

A Note: This is the beginning of a series of daily notes I'm trying out on this site. I don't know how long they'll last, but the goal is to write something interesting every day.

I usually am very skeptical of AI. This doesn't mean I don't use AI – in fact, I tend to use AI constantly throughout the day, whether it be for asking questions about the world to claude-3.5 or trying to fix programming problems. When I say I'm skeptical of AI, I mean that I rarely come across AI products that truly change my life in some meaningful way. I remember when I first played around with ChatGPT a few years ago, and generating a "poem about global trade in the style of Dr. Seuss" or "the history of WW2 in the style of a frat boy" was thrilling. Now, much of the AI world feels like simple wrappers of the OpenAI API, selling functionally the same product at an increased cost.

Recently, however, there are two AI products that I really do think will have a large impact on my life as a student. The first is Google's NotebookLM, specifically the ability to turn any PDF into a 10-minute podcast where the content is discussed in a light-hearted, conversational manner with anecdotes galore. I admit this does feel a little bit like the TikTok Generation's version of cliff-notes, but I find that rather than replacing the readings I have to do for classes, the podcast actually supplements my learning in a way that helps me to understand the topic. I actually think it's improving my conception of the information, which I think is a net good.

The second product is OpenAI's new and improved voice mode. While I'm still slightly skeptical of how useful NotebookLM will be in reality, the new voice mode has already helped me significantly with a specific task: language learning. I took French for 4 years in high school, but never really got the opportunity to have full-on conversations in the language, and I'm usually to scared to actually try in France. Today, I decided to give it a shot with ChatGPT, and ended up discussing my life with ChatGPT in only French. It was incredible – I was able to ask for words I didn't know, and ChatGPT would tell me when I made mistakes, all in French. Before I knew it, I had spent 30 minutes talking in French, by far the longest conversation I've ever had in the language.

If I had to pick a phrase to describe how I feel about all this, I think it would be "tentatively excited." A lot of people in the tech industry want to totally replace human creativity and education with that of AI – I think this is utterly misguided. I'm excited, however, to embrace these tools to supplement the learning I'm already doing. While nothing can replace real educational writing on a given subject, a podcast can certainly make complicated source texts easier to understand. And while I will always value a conversation with a real French speaker more than one with an AI, there's not a French speaker in my dorm at 11:30 on a weekday, so OpenAI will have to do.