Is NotebookLM the brand new CliffsNotes? (The reply could shock you)

Remember CliffsNotes?

The iconic yellow and black books summarized all kinds of literary works. They digested the plot and detailed the themes and symbolism. CliffsNotes called them “study guides,” but many used them to read the full version.

(Fun fact: CliffsNotes started in 1958 with a whole series of Shakespeare summaries and continues to publish today.)

CliffsNotes reviewers argue that surface analysis loses many of the nuances and themes of the work. Teachers and others considered using CliffsNotes as a cheat. But that wasn’t really what many students thought about when they read the CliffsNotes the day before they were due to submit an assignment.

CliffsNotes came to mind with the latest conversations about Google’s NotebookLM. It’s taking the business world by storm, so we asked Robert Rose, CMI’s Chief Strategy Advisor, for his thoughts. Continue reading or watch this video:

Is NotebookLM the CliffsNotes of the 21st century? Does a rose by any other name smell this sweet? What would NotebookLM ask if it could talk?

What’s new with Google’s AI application?

Like most Google products, NotebookLM is still in “experimental mode”. Touted as a note-taking app when it launched in the United States in December 2023, Google has added new features over the past 10 months and has a growing fan base.

As it stands, NotebookLM offers a way to talk about and get summaries of documents, videos, and audio files uploaded to its system. It reminds me of a much more sophisticated and advanced version of CliffsNotes.

Users can download the document, or source as Google calls it, then ask NotebookLM to summarize it, create a study guide, critique it, or answer questions about it in a user-friendly interface. cat. I’m blown away by how easy and natural it is to “talk to my documents.”

But the feature released in September that has everyone buzzing is the audio presentation. It generates the document as a user-friendly podcast-style audio file. The AI ​​hosts – an unnamed man and woman who appear young and energetic – provide a casual insight into the back-and-forth. To put it in a professional sports metaphor, the male AI provides play-by-play commentary, and the female AI gives color commentary and insight by asking questions or providing answers.

It’s impressive, especially since the technology adds one of my favorite new words: disfluencies – in their speech. The technology includes false starts, filler words, uhs, ahhs, likes – all those natural language voices that make hosts sound more human. It really looks like two young people discussing your source material and what it all means.

A few people have proclaimed that NotebookLM can automate business podcasts with these AI personalities. But is this really the best use case? Why would you want “someone” else to do it when the only creative contribution is the document you are organizing? This feels like a thin gap of differentiation and value.

Does NotebookLM produce anything really different?

Is there anything different at play with NotebookLM that can add real utility?

Based on my experiments, the answer is yes. This fits with the broader themes about AI that I’ve been discussing recently, and thus the most recent CliffsNotes metaphor.

I’ve downloaded the large number of numbers from CMI’s 2025 B2B Content Marketing Outlook that will be released next week. I asked him to write a summary. As you would expect, he gave a simple summary in about two pages of bullet points of the main topics and findings. But he also wrote a section with takeaways and actionable insights.

This looks impressive. However, after getting past the magnificent linguistic assemblage, I realized that the teachings and ideas are neither insightful nor wise. They simply highlight the results in a book-like format.

Key actions include “prioritizing strategy and goal setting,” “embracing data-driven decision making,” and “investing in technology and training.” While this all sounds good, it’s like reading a report on best practices for baking a cake and key actions include “start with fresh ingredients”, “make sure you mix everything well” and “make sure your oven is working. »

So I asked NotebookLM for one takeaway a marketer should take from reading this report. Well, he couldn’t give me just one, which makes sense, given that it’s designed to summarize. That gave me three, one of which was “the most successful B2B marketers attribute their success to a deep understanding of their target audience and creating high-quality content.”

Again, this sounds impressive, but to return to the baking report analogy, it’s like saying, “The best bakers attribute their success to the care they put into learning how to bake a cake and create high quality cakes. .”

So I tried the audio feature because it’s the most interesting aspect of NotebookLM. I asked him to provide a podcast-style audio overview. The eight-minute preview was impressive. But again, this is just a preview of the results, without any insight. The presenters made comments such as “Yes, good quality content is hard to create” and “Wow, B2B marketers are frustrated with the quality of their results.”

These results mimic what I see in all types of generative AI solutions, because that’s what they are designed to do. It’s all plot and no story. Generative AI tools are fantastic at recognizing patterns, summarizing, structuring, and providing the part of what happened in any story. This looks a lot like the 21st century version of CliffsNotes. Magic occurs when a human combines experience to look beyond “what happened” and derive or attribute meaning to it.

Is this the road not taken?

I have two thoughts. The first is that the value of NotebookLM is not diminished by its summary focus; it reminds you of the potential value of the tool. If you want a literal summary of a document, this can be extremely useful. If you want an eight-minute audio version summarizing a 50-page company earnings report, research study, technical paper, source code, or almost anything else, it’s truly valuable. It can serve as a study guide when you don’t have time to go through the entire document.

But that first thought is in tension with the second, and it’s the same caution CliffsNotes takes about its products. Valuable friction exists as you read, consume, and find meaning in the work. You must recognize that sometimes it is better to read the original, so that you can use your experience, empathy, creativity, and knowledge (largely your wisdom) to connect the non-obvious dots in the work. This is what often leads to valuable information, and you may not find it unless you read the entire work.

One of my favorite poems is The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I asked NotebookLM for a summary, and it gave me what CliffsNotes would have. Then I asked what the takeaway was, and NotebookLM delivered the same lesson that millions of graduation speeches, hundreds of TV commercials, and business books have concluded: “(take) the path the less traveled can lead to a more unique and fulfilling life. life.”

Except that’s not what the poem is about. If you read the poem carefully, thoroughly and several times, you realize that that is not the point. The title is The Road Not Taken and not The Road I Took. The poem is about what the author did not do, not what he did. Frost makes it clear that the roads are largely the same and there is no difference between the two. Additionally, the author says that in the future he will tell this story with a sigh, meaning he is not necessarily happy with the road less traveled or not taking the road more traveled . He leaves the reader ambiguous: “It made all the difference. » The poem itself is a commentary that life choices are what you make them. There is no right road to follow. The difference occurs after your choice.

So if you choose the NotebookLM route, don’t see it as a crutch to spare you the difficulty of making sense of the complexity and complications of ideas. Think of it as a companion that can help you move more easily from one idea to another and spend time on the ones that really matter.

It’s your choice.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute