Welcome to our first AI Watch column! The three of us talk monthly in the Libraries Lead Podcast (available at librarieslead.libraryjournal.com), and now we share content from that segment of the podcast in digital and print form through Library Journal. In this month’s column we talk about:

• NotebookLM (Google)

• Generative Artificial Intelligence Incubator Program (Virginia Tech, UC Riverside)

• Best AI Tools 2024

• AI Plays Table Tennis

David Lankes
University of Texas at Austin

My AI Watch of the month is NotebookLM.

Google has created a really neat tool called NotebookLM that uses AI to help with note-taking. It’s scary good, folks! You can upload all sorts of documents, like PDFs, websites, even transcripts of lectures like the ones I give. Then NotebookLM can give you a quick summary of the material, identify the major topics, and even create a study guide with a quiz and answers.

It has an audio summary feature that creates a podcast about your uploaded materials. When I uploaded some of my work, it created a podcast with human-sounding voices. Honestly, I think it did an even better job summarizing my work than I did! You can even use a chat interface to ask follow-up questions and get more information. NotebookLM is a powerful tool that can really help with learning and research, and I encourage everyone to check it out. Also, NotebookLM wrote this AI Watch description based on our discussion in the Libraries Lead podcast, where you can find a NotebookLM example.

Beth Patin
Syracuse University

My AI Watch of the month is the Generative Artificial Intelligence Incubator Program at Virginia Tech (VT) University Libraries.

The university libraries at VT and the University of California (UC), Riverside, just received an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to work on understanding generative AI for libraries, especially academic librarians. They are working on an incubator program for librarians with the goal of improving library services. I love the motivation for this project: Libraries should play a role in demystifying AI and guiding the public in its use. That’s something the three of us have talked about a lot.

For us to achieve this goal, we as librarians are going to have to learn generative AI and gain that kind of practical expertise so that we can think about ethical ways to integrate it into our work, and also how we help communities enable it and think carefully about how they use it, too. Yinlin Chen, assistant director for the VT University Libraries’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship; Edward Fox, computer science professor and co–principal investigator and director of the digital library research laboratory at VT; and Zhiwu Xie, co–principal investigator and assistant university librarian for research and technology at UC Riverside, worked to create the training manuals in fall 2024 and will pilot it this spring. I’m excited to see what happens through the support of this IMLS grant.

Mike Eisenberg
University of Washington

My AI Watch of the month are reviews of best AI tools for 2024 and Google’s DeepMind ping-pong playing robot:

• TechRadar’s Best AI Tools of 2024

• Tom’s Guide Awards 2024: The Best AI Tools and Devices We Tested this Year

• MIT Technology Review “Introducing: The AI Hype Index”

• MIT Technology Review “Google Deepmind Trained a Robot to Beat Humans at Table Tennis”

When Dave brought up NotebookLM, I realized that it seems like there’s a new AI-type thing every day that I need to get up to speed on. So, I thought I’d take a broader look at all the AI that’s available for the average person in 2024. And oh my, I found lots of references to so many different AIs with unique functions and capabilities.

There are AIs for voice generation, chatting (chatbots), translation, voice changing, building websites, coding, music creating, producing and editing, content creating, making videos, creating and generating images, editing photos, doing marketing and sales, analyzing businesses, stock trading, online learning, teaching, and even improving verbal assistants like Siri, Google, and Alexa. I was amazed and overwhelmed, as I’m sure most people are, with the breadth and scope of what’s available right now. To help you, in the citations (on our Libraries Lead episode page), I share some of the latest compiled reviews of AI tools that I found useful.

And then just for fun, here’s an AI story from MIT that I bumped into in which they combined AI and robotics. With Google DeepMind, they trained a robot to play and sometimes beat humans at ping-pong! The system uses vast amounts of data to refine the playing style and adjust its tactics as the matches progressed. It won over half the time.

And that is AI Watch for this month, folks!