AI

  • Great Things Require Time

    Hours Categories Storytelling

    It was Christmas Eve, and I was waiting in line for bagels.

    As someone who grew up in New York now living close to Philly, I’m admittedly a snob about the quality of the bagels I eat. But there’s a bagel shop not 5 minutes from my house that makes the best bagels I’ve ever had outside of NY/NJ.

    And they offer preorders for Christmas Eve. It’s become a bit of a tradition in our house to get those bagels and do a Christmas Eve brunch.

    They also have a select stock for people on a first come first serve basis. People who preorder can buy from this stock. The many preorders combined with the select stock creates a long line. After-all, these bagels are superb.

    So we waited.

    And during that wait, there were some people who complained about the wait1.

    But no one left the line or cancelled their order. After all, if all they wanted was bagels, they could have gone to the grocery store a few doors down and buy bagels immediately.

    But those are not even good bagels. And we wanted great bagels.

    See, there’s a dirty little secret that no one wants to hear these days:

    Great things require time. And they’re worth the wait.

    What does this have to do with podcasting? Or content creation in general?

  • Using AI to Help You with Your Podcast

    Hours Categories AI

    Human beings have more or less been obsessed with robots taking our jobs since the term “Robot” was first coined in 1920, in a play that depicts just that!

    Then, of-course, there was I, Robot, where in 1950, Isaac Asimov lays out his “Three Laws of Robotics.”

    Perhaps one of the most telling early work is Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, published in 1952 about a dystopian future where virtually all jobs are replaced by automation.

    For something more contemporary (and more optimistic), you can look to John Danaher’s Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work, which argues that a workless, automated society may allow us to focus on more, “creative, intellectual, and social pursuits.”

    You know — those things that actually make us human, and not just being striving toward complete and total efficiency.

    No matter what you think, the Generative AI boom of the past year has accelerated conversations like this. Will AI replace me? What can’t AI replace? How can I leverage AI for my job? What’s overhyped?

    As a podcaster, you might be wondering these same things.

    After all, you’ve likely seen some AI generated content to make you think that human podcasters are on the way out.

    So I thought for the penultimate article in this year’s podcast advent, we’d explore the ghost of podcast present: AI.

    There will be lots of articles recapping “this year in podcasting,” but if I had to pick a topic that affected the space most this year, it would be AI.

    You can think of it as podcasting’s [Artificial] Person of the Year.

    The “artificial” part is important. Because even though AI has gotten exponentially better this year, there’s something AI can’t replace: the human element.

    What AI can do for us is assist. It can help us generate ideas, research topics, create assets, repurpose content, and make our shows more accessible.

    So let’s take a look at how AI is impacting podcasting now.

    Note: I’m going to assume at this point, that you know what AI is. If not, I wrote a handy primer for you.