A Lucretius Today AI Experiment: AI Summaries Of Two Lucretius Today Podcast Episodes

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    This past weekend I listened to a computer tech podcast (The "Ask Noah Show") which mentioned the use of Googles' "Notebookllm" for generation of AI summaries.

    The podcast discussed many ethical issues surrounding AI, and I very much recommend their discussion. The podcaster who gave most of the discussion is an employee of "Red Hat" (a major linux/computer company owned by IBM). and their episode can be found here.

    Those podcasters decided to see what AI would do with their own work, and based on their example, I did the same thing with two of our Lucretius Today podcasts.

    Of course I think our own live podcasts are better, but if you compare the summary to original I think you'll find that the Ai summary is shockingly good. And this is not just a text summary -- this is a live dialogue between two very professional sounding AI voices.

    While the result is far from perfect, the ease with which this was produced is very worrying.

    Here are the links:


    Both episodes revolve around the absence of pain issue, with 295 devoted to Plutarch and 294 devoted to Cicero. I am not making these videos publicly findable on the Youtube page, but the private links above are available for comparison.

    I enjoyed both the original podcasts and the summaries. To my level of understanding, the summaries complement the long form podcasts. For me, listening to both deepens my own thoughts process.

    And on the tech level at this stage of the development, all I can say is WOW!

    Dave Tamanini

    Harrisburg, PA, USA

    Yep Dave it's amazing. It apparently had no problem understanding the audio, and then it found the major points and summarized them sometimes with more clarity than the original. It definitely didn't track 100%, and it also introduced some details that we did not talk about, but you'd have to think that this kind of summary would be better than many people could do even at college level and only then after many hours of work.

    Lots of food for thought.

    Quote from Don

    It's sort of the uncanny valley transposed to the audio instead of video environment.

    Thanks for showing that. Whoddathought? I may lose the battle long term, but I have to fight against using female pronouns when referring to my GPS's voice in the car, and Alexa's voice at home. It's--it--it!

    Dave Tamanini

    Harrisburg, PA, USA

    First of all, to hell with Plutarch. Second of all, I don't know if I feel happy that technology is evolving in a way that can help us study true Philosophy or if I feel scared for how AI has advanced. Imagine how many scams these AI voices can create!

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