Google has given its NotebookLM platform a major upgrade that continues to take the AI-powered research notebook into new realms, even beyond studying and helping organize your own life. The latest enhanced research and content creation capabilities powered by Gemini enable it to discover sources, conduct research, generate visual assets, and even create presentations from fairly basic prompts. Plus, you can improve the presentations with suggestions to alter individual slides.
Google pitches the improved NotebookLM as a way to shape information into finished products using AI, so I gave it a test. I have an interest in the Hudson River School of art, a collection of artists whose paintings turned wilderness into mythology and shaped how generations of Americans imagined their country — for better or for worse.
So, without uploading any of my own research, I simply asked NotebookLM to “create a presentation with a mix of text, visuals, and other formats to tell the story of the Hudson School of art to those who know nothing about it.” The resulting presentation can be seen in full here.
Artistic story
A presentation about the Hudson River School could be a timeline, an artist profile collection, a lesson on landscape painting, or a discussion of American identity. The structure determines everything. There were a few hiccups that required me to request edits on a couple of slides, but they were honestly minor. The overall result was good, if perhaps not very inspired. Even the title “The Canvas of a Nation” felt like a first-draft option.
But though it was workmanlike in explaining things like Luminism, there were no hallucinations, and the AI did seem to get that framing the movement as a story about how art helped shape American identity was far better than simply reciting names and dates.
As the deck progressed, NotebookLM introduced increasingly varied ways of communicating ideas. A Venn diagram explained how national identity, religious belief, and westward expansion converged within the movement’s depiction of landscape. Another slide compared the concepts of the Sublime and the Beautiful side by side, using contrasting imagery and emotional goals to explain artistic philosophy.
Neither visualization was something I had specifically requested. Both were exactly the kind of explanation a newcomer would need. That was a point in its favor as traditional presentation software often encourages users to repeat the same formula over and over. Title. Bullet points. Image. Repeat. The NotebookLM presentation seemed determined to avoid that trap.
The deck experimented with process diagrams in Cole’s famous Course of Empire series, turning it into a circular visualization that shows civilization progressing through stages of growth, prosperity, destruction, and decline.
The later sections became even more ambitious. One slide used a map to trace the expansion of Hudson River School ideas from the Catskills to the American West, South America, and even the Arctic. Another focused on women artists, including Susie M. Barstow and Julie Hart Beers, combining biographical information with visual comparisons and historical context.
What struck me was how naturally the presentation shifted between formats. It felt less like a slideshow and more like a documentary. Different visual approaches appeared whenever the AI thought they best served the story. As Google boasted, NotebookLM is no longer simply organizing information; it is making editorial decisions about how audiences learn.
Visualized stories
The final slides connected the movement’s paintings to the early conservation movement and the eventual creation of protected public lands before concluding with a visual legacy section highlighting museums and historic sites that preserve the artists’ work today.
By that point, I realized the third version had mostly solved the problem I often encounter when building presentations myself. I usually know what information I want to include; what takes time is figuring out how to present it. From this initial presentation, I could think of many ways to edit and improve it, but it gave shape to what I might put together that would otherwise have taken me many hours of painstaking manual design. For true art, that’s appropriate, but there are plenty of times when information needs to be conveyed in a presentation that prioritizes immediacy over artistry. NotebookLM is ready to step in when that’s the case.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
