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Key takeaways

• NotebookLM now offers slide deck and infographic features.
• They're available to all subscribers.
• It remains to be seen whether they will help or hinder learning.

As a reporter covering AI, I've had to get used to feeling deeply impressed and a little unsettled. There are few tools that have evoked this strange cocktail of emotions in me more than Google's NotebookLM.

Having debuted just a little over two years ago, the platform feels like an early glimmer of what truly useful AI will look like in the future. If you've never tried it, think of it like a study or research assistant that can quickly generate materials that fit your particular learning style, and that can (in theory) accelerate the process of you coming to grips with a new subject. 

Also: I found an open-source NotebookLM alternative that's powerful, private - and free

On Thursday, Google announced in posts on NotebookLM's dedicated X account that the platform had been updated with new slide decks and infographics features. They were initially available exclusively to Google AI Pro subscribers -- a plan which comes with a one-month free trial before a $20 per month cost kicks in -- but the company announced in another X post Friday that they've been rolled out to all users.

'Think smarter, not harder'

Generally speaking, one of the most prevalent sales pitches for AI that you'll hear from Silicon Valley execs and other true believers is that it's an aid and enabler to human cognition -- that it amplifies innate human intelligence, reduces the time between ideation and production, and makes it possible for just about anyone to turn even their most far out creative ideas into something tangible. (You could also make a strong argument that it atrophies cognition and creativity by doing all the really hard work for you, but we'll get to that later.)

NotebookLM is a great example of this line of thinking. The bio in its X account reads: "Think smarter, not harder."

Also: I used NotebookLM for an entire month - here's why it really is a game changer

The Audio Overview feature, for example, which produces lifelike audio discussions based on your sources, can be useful for anyone who considers themselves to be more of an auditory learner or who prefers listening to podcasts and audiobooks over reading. The two new features that were announced Thursday -- both of which are powered by Google's new Nano Banana Pro image-generating model -- are more useful for visual learners (or anyone who's procrastinated on building a presentation and needs something quickly).

's experiments

Let's start with the slide deck feature. I wanted to give the underlying AI a bit of a challenge by seeing how well it could synthesize and communicate, especially complicated information, to a non-expert, so I dug up a preprint paper posted online earlier this year titled: "Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates: Multi-frequency constraints from cosmic radiation backgrounds." Needless to say, the subject matter is intensely technical -- far, far beyond my own humble physics education.

I uploaded the PDF of the paper into NotebookLM to create a new "notebook," then I clicked on the "Slide Deck" icon at the far right of my screen. That icon includes an edit option, also at the right, which I clicked to specify the kind of deck I was looking for. Here's the prompt I went with: "Create a presentation that includes a high-level overview of this recent 'Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates' paper. Try to make the material accessible to the average reader -- someone who has a casual interest in cosmology but isn't an expert in the underlying math/physics." (You can also choose a length -- "Short," "Default," or "Long" -- and from a long list of languages.) Then I clicked "Generate."

Also: NotebookLM's powerful Deep Research upgrade lets it search the web and create a full report - here's how

The system took 10 or 15 minutes to create the deck, but the results were (unsurprisingly) impressive. The deck was presented as a kind of cosmic dimestore detective novel, titled "The Case of the Missing Matter." The material was organized and presented in a way that was much more digestible for a layperson than the charts and figures presented in the actual paper. It's easy to imagine myself as a university college student using the deck as a primer to get a high-level overview of the paper's main arguments before diving into the paper itself, or the authors using it as an approachable introduction for non-experts. (As a side note, you can also download and share AI-generated decks in NotebookLM, or play them as a slideshow.)

Of course, as I've already made clear, I'm not a physicist, so I had to take NotebookLM's word that it wasn't completely hallucinating any of the more arcane details which it was purportedly summarizing from the paper.

For my second experiment, therefore, I decided to test how well the system would do with a subject I understand reasonably well. I'd been writing a fair bit about consciousness, and so I prompted NotebookLM to generate an infographic that succinctly explains and visualizes the differences between "physicalism" (a school of thought that holds that the feeling of subjective experience is generated by physical processes in the brain) and "idealism" (which holds that the physical world emerges from consciousness). 

I uploaded two web links to NotebookLM -- the entries for physicalism and idealism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive -- and entered the following prompt: "Can you please generate a simple infographic providing a broad overview of the debate between physicalism and idealism as it pertains to research into the mind and brain? Please try to make the subject approachable and engaging to a non-expert." For the infographic feature, you're able to customize by orientation (Landscape, Portrait, or Square), "level of detail" ("Concise," "Standard," and "Detailed," the last of which is currently in beta), and again, language. I went with "Landscape" and "Standard."

Based on my own knowledge of the subject matter, the resulting image didn't contain any hallucinated information, and it provided a nice summary of both the physicalist and idealist worldviews. There were, however, some very minor visual errors and stylistic details that I would personally want to clean up before presenting it to an audience, if that were my end goal. Unfortunately, there's currently no option to edit existing infographics.

Clearly, the new visual aid features can be helpful for someone who's looking to learn the basics of a new subject. But most people probably aren't going to be using them for self-education; more often than not, they'll likely be used for more practical purposes at school or at work. With that in mind, I uploaded a link to my personal website and asked the system to generate an infographic illustrating my journalistic career, which could be submitted to a hiring manager as a supplement to a resume and a cover letter.

In broad strokes, it generated an accurate and clean-looking mage that I could see myself using in a future job search. It wasn't perfect; it was admittedly a bit on the flattering side, and there were some minor glitches in the finer text -- it misspelled "Berkeley" as "Borkeley," for example -- but on the whole it seemed like a valuable asset that not so long ago probably would've taken hours and a fluency in graphic design to be able to be able to create.

Is less friction really good for us?

I mentioned above that NotebookLM sometimes leaves me feeling unsettled. That was definitely the case here, too.

As a writer, the most rewarding and enriching experiences of my career have been those times when I've had to step outside of my intellectual comfort zone and tussle with new and challenging subjects. Advanced math and physics aren't subjects that I'm typically able to intuitively grasp, but I enjoy the challenge of sitting with a paper for hours or days on end and trying to comprehend it -- or at least comprehend it well enough to be able to communicate it at a high level to a general audience. 

Also: You can now give NotebookLM more instructions - here's why that's a game changer

NotebookLM's slide deck of the "Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates" paper was probably a roughly faithful overview of the paper, but I can't help but feel that it was an extremely thin substitute for putting in the hard and sometimes uncomfortable work of actually wrestling with the paper itself, whether I was trying to educate myself or translate the information into an approachable presentation that I was going to present to an audience. Friction is a vital ingredient for learning. And tools like NotebookLM remove a whole lot of friction. 

In other words, it's not at all clear that LLMs are genuinely helping us learn, or if they're just making us feel like we're learning while they actually make us intellectually lazier. And there's evidence showing that they could be hindering users' memory recall and critical thinking skills.

But again, self-education is unlikely to be the majority use case for these new visual aid tools. Far more prevalent will probably be those instances in which users turn to them to quickly generate materials to be used for school- or work-related tasks. The infographic, as a supplement to a resume and cover letter scenario outlined above, is an example of one that could conceivably have genuine value for the user without taking too much of a toll on their mental flexibility, since that would ordinarily be the kind of task that's more time-consuming and tedious than cognitively demanding.

They could also be useful as a shortcut for, say, quickly generating a visual aid for an upcoming presentation at the office or in the classroom. But here too, one should beware of the degree to which they're offloading the hard cognitive work onto AI. As with all LLM-powered tools, the new features from NotebookLM might save you a lot of time and mental effort, but it could also very well be the case that a lot of time and mental effort are the two most vital ingredients in any piece of high-quality original work.

My best advice: Use the new features -- and AI in general -- with caution, and only as a backup to your own brainpower.

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