Our Grand Experiment is Live!
Presenting the Lectures on Lacan AI Study Companion
Over the past few weeks, the excitement for our new AI assistant has been incredible. I’m honored to be in the midst of this grand pedagogical experiment with you. 🤓
In our sneak peeks, we’ve seen some of what this new study companion can do: from responding to complex questions and synthesizing technical terms to generating study guides, video overviews, and podcast-style dialogues — all with clickable citations linking you to precise moments in our lecture series and Lacan’s own work.
As with any true experiment, building this AI assistant on Google’s continually evolving NotebookLM platform has been a process of discovery, to say the least. 😅 With the exciting possibilities all of this presents, however, come some important parameters as well:
A Study Companion, Not an Oracle: Our AI assistant is an interactive, personalized tool designed to accelerate independent research and learning. Its purpose is to provoke further inquiry, guiding you into the complexities of Lacan’s thought, not to settle technical or theoretical debates.
A Work in Progress: Our AI study companion is trained exclusively on the Lectures on Lacan archive. This means no web scraping or third-party bullshit — but also that the model is still developing. Many of the lecture transcripts on which it’s trained are still in draft form, and many of Lacan’s seminars and writings have yet to be featured in our lecture series. (If you’d like to help refine our sources, please let me know. Calling all human research assistants!)
A Note on Advanced Features: In our final testing phase, we found that some of the model’s advanced content-creation features — mostly around generating and storing custom outputs — aren’t yet part of Google’s free tier. 😑 Thankfully, this doesn't affect the model’s core functions: all of its research, learning, and conversational tools remain completely free for everyone. 🎉
Which brings us to the fun part...
Accessing Our New AI Study Companion
Here’s what you need to know to get started — and stay tuned for more updates as this pedagogical experiment of ours continues to unfold:
Free for All Community Members: The core functions of our AI study companion are free for everyone with a Google account. This includes asking questions, holding multi-turn conversations, clicking citations into our archive, saving responses externally, and using all of the study guides, video overviews, and podcast dialogues in our Studio.
Looking Ahead: Some of the ways we’d like the model to store and organize custom work will depend on future platform updates. But depending on your account type — and in some cases, student status — you may already have access to these extra features. A nice bonus, to be sure — but not required to make the most of our new study companion. 🤩
Suffice it to say, I’m thrilled to finally share this with you. Click the link below to begin exploring.
Welcome to the next phase of our adventure. 🤘🏽
This is an amazing resource and deserves to be widely known and used. It is an excellent pedagogical tool for learning Lacanian ideas, explaining them clearly, and setting them in a theoretical context that helps clarify them. It is also good for sharpening our understanding of concepts that we have a fuzzy understanding of and for mapping their relations with other concepts. It is also a great tool for brainstorming our ideas.
I think it is a great venture given the assault on the use of AI coming from the academic framework that can often be summarised as “Professors discover cheating!”. They try to produce a priori arguments for the intrinsic uselessness and stultification of human-AI interaction.
These anti-AI academics are similar to the academics in Galileo’s time who refused to look through a telescope (this is something everyone knows) and who did so for excellent and, in the academic context of the day, quite valid reasons (something that few people today realise).
It is true that telescopes from the classical period produced hallucinations, as do AI today. The solution in both cases is not only gradually perfecting the instrument (if you wait for a perfect instrument you will die before getting to the discoveries you could have made), but also in taking time and testing the AIs capacities (and your own), its reponses, and your conclusions.
Applying these considerations to the Lectures on Lacan AI Study Companion, we can of course get excellent one-off answers (this is due to the excellent quality of the training material - Lacan’s writings and Samuel McCormick’s lectures), but if we keep the chat going we will pose better and better questions and get ever more intelligent responses - a real dialogue emerges.
Excellent! I wrote what I thought was a challenging question, and the assistant provided a detailed and comprehensive answer.