- Podcasters have been testing ChatGPT and a variety of other AI tools to support their workflow.
- Listeners have mixed feelings about the ethics of using ChatGPT for podcasts, a new survey showed.
- 5 podcasters shared how they use AI tools and how they approach ChatGPT.
Influencers and creators have been testing a variety of use cases for ChatGPT — the buzzy AI chatbot that generates detailed answers to prompts — from asking it for help with scripting videos, to writing emails and LinkedIn posts, to drafting legal agreements.
And in podcasting, the use of AI has sparked some debate around ethics.
A survey from the podcast monetization company Acast showed about half of listeners thought it was ethical for podcasters to use tools like ChatGPT as long as they were only being used for idea generation, while 36% thought it was ethical to use in any way. About 15% thought using chatbots was unethical in all scenarios.
“From the listener’s perspective, it’s a very close relationship,” said Tommy Walters, commercial insights manager at Acast. “They’re actively choosing that podcast out of thousands of options, so they want to make sure that the ideas that they’re consuming are genuine.”
Podcasters were more accepting of AI without limits. 84% of podcasters surveyed thought it was ethical to use ChatGPT in all scenarios, while 49% said they’d limit use to idea generation. None of the podcasters thought it was unethical.
Insider spoke with five podcasters about their use of ChatGPT and other AI tools in their everyday workflow. They generally agreed that the intimacy between a podcast host and a listener creates a special kind of trust that extensive use of AI could jeopardize.
“If you as a creator are trying to share your voice to the world, programming that doesn’t feel authentic.” said Jordan Schwarzenberger, the host of the creator-economy podcast UNBOXED. “As long as it’s additive and it’s supportive of your creativity and your voice, then I’m personally ethically fine, it’s when it becomes the voice that I have an issue.”
Schwarzenberger and other podcasters said the use of chatbots like ChatGPT should be limited to functions like summarizing key points from shows, social-media content creation, or to boost creativity — but not do the podcaster’s job.
They also said they’d successfully experimented with other AI tools that cut down the editing and marketing portion of the process. Descript, for example, uses AI to transcribe the sound from a video or an audio track and allows editing straight from the transcription.
“Descript is fantastic. I’ve used that for five years now and it’s just got better and better,” said Amber Bateman, executive producer at production company Listen, which produces UNBOXED. “It’s really helpful for transcribing, as well as quick audio editing.”
ChatGPT can be used for scriptwriting, but it’s most helpful after the show’s been produced
Leveraging ChatGPT can be enticing to podcasters to boost efficiency.
“We’re not looking to replace people, but use new tools to increase efficiency, increase accuracy, generate new ideas, and essentially just increase our output by the end of the day,” said Gordon Osborne, head of partnerships and marketing at media company Motiversity, which focuses on motivational content.
Motiversity publishes several motivational video podcasts, including collections of affirmations and quotes. Osborne and Motiversity founder Joel Huculak have used ChatGPT to write scripts for these videos.
“It’s just to get the bare bones of it,” Huculak said. “It still requires some editing, AI is not necessarily funny, or creates emotion or that sort of thing, so you really have to humanize it.”
Other podcasters said they’d found a better use case for ChatGPT after a show had already been created — to repurpose its content for social media, or to write summaries or show notes.
“If we want to put a new spin on the content and stretch it out more, we would use ChatGPT,” said Robert Hanna, host of the podcast Legally Speaking.
Hanna and his team have used ChatGPT to generate headlines. Richard Blake, director of marketing and growth at podcast-production company Fresh Air, said ChatGPT had been helpful with show descriptions or episode descriptions that summarize content from the show itself.
Podcasters have also tried the chatbot to do research, but with mixed results. They found that it often gives factually incorrect answers or provides very limited information.
Podcasters welcome AI that helps with audio editing and automating social-media content
AI tools that help automate the editing and repurposing of content have been more useful than ChatGPT, the podcasters said.
Here were some of the top ones:
- Descript. The platform transcribes the sound from a video or an audio track and allows editing straight from the transcription. It also helps with multitrack editing, clipping audio into smaller segments, and AI voice generation.
- Choppity, a tool that promises to “turn long videos into TikToks in three clicks.” It also creates branding presets that it applies to all videos to be shared on social media.
- Otter.ai, which allows for audio live transcriptions and note taking.
- Lately.ai has helped with social-media content creation. The tool repurposes longform content into text, audio, or video posts, and analyzes data from pre-existing social content to match the style and tone of the person or brand using it.
- Midjourney, which generates images through AI, has helped with thumbnail creation for YouTube videos.
Acast’s survey showed that a majority of podcasters — 74% of them — believe AI can make their content “much better.”
But that doesn’t mean it can replace the “original, startling, funny, and messy” quality of the human input, Blake said.
“There’s a real detail and context behind every podcast that is made, so I think the fact that they’re free from AI, they’re free from the robots, is one of their special things,” he said. “I won’t tell you that AI is replacing podcasts, or that we will be creating podcasts out of AI, because that negates what the magic of podcasting is.”
