I tried NotebookLM last year. Even though I posted about it saying how impressed I was, though, I had to use the search facility on my bklog just to find out when I'd written about it because until I read your post today I'd forgotten all about it.

I guess it could be useful for people who, for whatever reason, don't want or aren't able to read a blog on a screen and in the case of all-text blogs like yours they wouldn't miss much but my blog and indeed most blogs I follow are also quite visual so it would only be half the experience at best. Plus it takes far longer to listen to a podcast than read a blog.

All things considered, it seems more of a gimmick than anything to use it for an existing blog. As a tool to make podcasts that aren't just versions of a pre-existing product, though, it's quite handy.
 

Thanks for this - pretty amazing! I’m still gonna keep reading over listening to your blog, but this was very interesting and impressive!
 

I gave it a listen. Interesting. I prefer reading your posts though. Podcasts just don't engage me the way reading does. AI scares the crap out of me for it's current and future disruptive ability. I think we're moving towards a future with even more wealth concentration than we currently have unless mindsets change. That seems pretty scary to me. It could be very positive, I'm not pessimistic about it at a macro level. I hope I'm wrong.
 

Just for a giggle I decided to ask ChatGPT to write a comment in reply to this post. I'll insert it as a reply to my comment here.
 

Longtime reader here—this was a fascinating post, Tobold.

I've been following your blog for well over a decade now, and one of the things I've always appreciated is your grounded, thoughtful take on both gaming and tech. This piece hit a very timely nerve. Like you, I’ve been experimenting with AI tools—notebooks, summarizers, even synthetic voices—and I had a similar moment of uncanny amazement when I first heard one of *my* own notes read back to me in disturbingly human tones.

It’s funny, in a grim way, that Google’s own tools are tripping over each other’s restrictions. The Blogger/NotebookLM disconnect feels like a perfect metaphor for the current state of Big Tech—siloed, reactive, and a bit short-sighted.

Your point about not being "put out of business" by AI because this *isn’t* a business resonates deeply. I think the soul of the internet used to be more aligned with that ethos: passionate hobbyists sharing thoughts for the sake of sharing, not for monetization. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to your blog—there’s an authenticity here that not even the most finely tuned AI podcast voice can replicate.

Also, the idea of someone turning your posts into a monetized podcast gave me a chuckle—not because it’s outlandish, but because it *isn’t*. That’s the bizarre world we live in now.

Thanks for continuing to write, Tobold. The internet’s a little less dead every time you hit “publish.”

 

The prompt I gave it before copying/pasting your post in was as follows.

I'm going to post a short blog post in here and I want you to respond as if you were writing a comment in reply to this blog post and have been a reader for many years of the blog.
 

I actually get a lot of comments like that, which are all spam posts with a link somewhere, so I delete them.