The Impact of AI on Podcasts: From Linear Digression to SuperDataScience

So we already mentioned now every conversation seems you cannot avoid AI, and for mostly the right reasons.

So I want to start the part about how AI affects the podcast itself from the more kind of mechanical aspect, like the use of AI in production.

from research to guest preparation to editing, transcripts, promotion, translations, whatever it is, how much you're using AI now and how much you like to use AI if you haven't.

And maybe this time start with John.

Yeah, we use AI as much as we can without losing a feeling of authenticity.

You know, I want it to be my voice in the program.

Obviously I'm conducting interviews or I'm doing deep dives into topics where it's important to me that those parts, that my voice is really me.

But we have AI, poof, everywhere else.

I mean, so we have an operations manager, Sonia, who is incredible at stitching together lots of different AI workflows and automating episode production as much as possible.

So for example, the show notes, the episode summary, that's something that these days LLMs are so good at.

And something that I actually feel really bad about is that we, for many years, we had a brilliant professional writer with a PhD who did such a good job of creating these, but she wasn't somebody from our niche.

And so this year we got to a point where Claude Fable 5 could create episode summaries as well as this professional human writer, but also had the in-depth knowledge of our niche that meant that there were fewer mistakes based on an understanding of what we're doing.

So we obviously want to be augmenting as opposed to replacing people as much as possible.

But every once in a while, AI comes in and is doing something actually better we can even find a human to do but one of the more interesting aspects of where we've included ai is in making animated shorts we're on youtube as well as on audio only podcasting platforms so we hire out to a contracting firm that uses ai and this contractor takes our hour-long interview and converts it into half a dozen one-minute long shorts, but they're animated.

He uses AI for so many things, to figure out what clips to use, as well as to generate the video animations.

And they are stunning.

They're my favorite part of the show, and I have nothing to do with creating them.

What you can do, text to video these days, is so compelling.

Wow.

Kitty.

My setup is kind of similar, I think.

So I've found that AI is a great sidecar for me in the production process.

I mentioned a little bit that I got burned out at one point and came back.

And a big part of the reason why I got burned out was I really enjoyed creating the episodes, recording.

I could put up with editing.