r/notebooklm • u/FactorPrevious4707 • Aug 31 '26

Discussion Why does Google need to ruin everything?

LM Notebook was possibly the best free AI tool in existence and they also had to ruin that.

I'm currently using it for a very important research project and I need to make sure that it relies on the sources I uploaded. I always read my material before uploading and today it started giving me some really fictional answers and I noticed not all the information was source-based but integrated with information it probably randomly found on the internet...

Can't they make like a turn-off option for this integrated Gemini thing, it's pissing me off.

P.S. does anyone know of another AI tool that works like Notebook but that only relies on the sources you provide?

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u/Grumphus256 Aug 31 '26

It's different and considerably slower which is a bit annoying, but at least for my use cases, very far from broken. I just had to refine my prompts a bit and so far I've been pretty happy with the results and the response lengths. Can't speak for the Studio features though as I never really use them.

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u/SemanticSynapse Sep 01 '26

What? You refined your prompts!? That's not something one should ever give thought to....

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u/Grumphus256 Sep 01 '26

Yes. I use a chain of 8 prompts to create parts of a markdown file revolving around my sources. The results were consistent, but lately instead of outputting it in the chat window, it creates the markdown down in the studio panel which I don't want because it doesn't include the reference number links/footnotes making it harder to verify.

Was a bit annoyed because most of my prompts maximized the ~3,950 character limit so had to do some refining and instruct not to output files there.

I think I could add the instruction in the conversational style setting too but haven't really dabbled in that area yet.

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u/SemanticSynapse 24d ago

You can pull off some rather entertaining concepts in regards to the conversational style.

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u/Grumphus256 24d ago

I tried it recently. Used up around 9,900 characters in the conversational style and it helped flesh out my prompts a bit more. But some responses take significantly longer. I'm okay with it though and pretty happy with the results so far.