From AI Slop to Authenticity: Navigating Podcast Disclosures <<< (generated by AI)

Do we need disclosures in the future? This is the future of podcasting, where we ponder what awaits the podcasters of today. From the school of podcasting, here's Dave Jackson.

And from the Audacity to podcast, here's Daniel J. Lewis. DANIEL Future of podcasting 52. We're talking disclosures.

So we're gonna peel back the curtain and talk about if you should peel back the curtain a little bit. And I think one of the things I wanted to talk about, we'll just jump right into it.

I had somebody that wanted to advertise on my show called Ask the Podcast Coach. I use Buzzsprout for that particular show. And I clicked on it and I wanted to go hear the other show.

And lo and behold, it was everybody's favorite co host and sidekick. I refer to them as Kyle and Cheryl, better known as the Google Notebook twins.

Ooh, let's dive into that.

Let's do a deep dive. Let's strap in and talk about disclosures. And I don't know why. I think because this person didn't disclose.

It was like, you know, the intro came on, and all of a sudden here came Kyle and Cheryl. And I was like, wait a minute, did I miss a disclosure? And the fact that he was kind of not just putting it out there.

And I just thought, okay, I know these two, and I know they're not real, but I thought, but what if I didn't, like, in the future, are Kyle and Cheryl going to win a podcast award because they're so popular? I'm like, I don't know. But I. It just. It really did rub me the wrong way. I don't know what have you run into this yet?

Not into AI stuff. I tend to stick with the same group of podcasts I have heard. Well, I could take POD News Daily, for example, with James Cridland.

There was a time when he was sick, lost his voice, and he used AI to voice his entire episode. And he disclosed that at the beginning. And I could understand now. It was obviously, since we listened to James so much, it could not replace him.

Right.

It sounded like AI to me. I could tell other people might not, especially if that was the only thing they heard from him. Yeah, they might not tell.

Now, the bigger idea here, and there are some interesting, specific things to get into, as well as something I submitted as a proposal for podcasting 2.0. But the bigger picture here is what needs to be disclosed and why.

Right now, the conversation is so much around the use of AI but for years, we've needed to disclose things in ways that were compensated. That is a big thing.

So much that the FTC recently in the United States came out with some new guidelines a couple of years ago to say, here's when you need to disclose. Here are some ways you need to disclose. You need to make sure your disclosure is very prominent.

Talking about affiliates or if you're compensated in any way by talking about something or by including content. And I did a whole episode about disclosures and such related to that.

But it has really changed from you can't just stick something at the end of your episode or on the footer of your website or on a separate disclosures page on your website. It needs to be prominent because. And this is the reason.

So think about this for anything along this line of disclosure, because the person on the other side, the audience, needs that information so they can take it into consideration for how they then take action or receive the rest of the information. Because if I'm being told by you that you're getting paid $1,000 per minute to talk about the color blue, I'm going to think, well, wait a minute.

Does he really like the color blue? $1,000aminute. That's a lot. I mean, I talked about the color blue for $50aminute.

So knowing that you're compensated now, you don't have to disclose how much you're compensated, but it's that thing that's giving me information to make my own decision. So it's putting the responsibility then in my hands.

Because now that I know that you are being compensated for talking about the color blue, I can decide if I'm going to believe you or not.

And then you can also do a good job of proving whether you're saying good things only because you're being compensated or if you are just a shill for it because you're just. That's your sponsor for the moment.

Well, I always thought it was funny when I would see articles about podcast media hosting, and the only people they reviewed just so happened to be those companies that had affiliate programs. It was like, wait, you're not going to talk about this? Coming up. Just Captivate, Buzzsprout, Blueberry, you know, Libsyn, that was it.

And that was like, oh, that's kind of odd that they're not. Because there are other ones they didn't talk about Spotify, didn't talk about Red Circle or any of the other ones that are out there.

And I was like, oh, I see what's going on here. These all have Affiliate programs. And that may have been, you know, why they chose those people to do that.

I know for a while there were so many websites, they're probably still out there talking about web hosting.

Oh, yes, yes.

Because I remember when I was making I think 50 bucks from Hostgator back in the day, you know, you get a couple people sign up for that, like, all right, dinner's on Dave tonight. That's cool. Yeah, the FTC actually had. It was ftc.gov I think, influencer for a while.

There was an actual like video there and they explained how it has to be at the beginning. So like all my newsletters now start off with my Amazon. I may earn whatever, you know, the disclaimer for that.

And they're saying in the, you know, if you're doing videos and like, hey, today's show is brought to you by Dr. Rob. Blah, blah, blah. By the way, today's guest is, you guessed it, Dr. Rob. Like, you have to say that up front.

And I just think the young kids back in the day on MTV had a very popular show called Catfish, which I never quite.

I guess this is a real thing where people get online and you think you found the person of your dreams, only to find out that it's some 14 year old kid that's having a prank. And I'm like, well, in a way, if you don't disclose that I'm not real, that's catfishing. And so somebody. Again, that's to me.

And I think the difference is the disclosure. Because look, we all watch TV and I know that Monica Geller and Rachel Green and everybody else on Friends, they're not real.

They're playing characters. But that's the whole point. I know they're playing a character. It's weird. You kind of.

That's why you get sad when somebody dies or whatever, because you somehow feel like you know, this person that doesn't really exist, it's a character. But if you don't know that, then you just feel like you're, you know. Wow, I love. This is one of my favorite podcasts.

I just, I identify so much with this person. Then you find out later it's not. If you want to get on my bad side, lie to me. Because you don't have to lie to me. Like, I can take lots of criticism.

You don't. There's no reason to not just tell me the truth. And if you don't and I find out, it's hard for me to trust you again. So maybe that's the other thing.

Too. I just have a. I am sensitive to people lying to me, I guess.

Well, and especially in this space with AI taking over for so much, or rather people giving over control to AI. I mentioned this. I was a guest on the podcasting 2.0 show recently with Dave and Adam. And I brought this point up too.

And I've mentioned this in my own podcast that there's so much. I love Adam's term for this. So I'm going to help spread this.

There's so much AI sloppy out there that when you share a genuine opinion, to me, it stands out. The web hosting thing.

I know that in the past I've looked for things and Blue Host is almost always near the top because they pay out the biggest affiliate program. And if you get on YouTube, like looking up for product reviews or something like that, you'll typically see like this AI slop.

That is, they just found the top rated products on Amazon and that's the order of their recommendations. And they have the audacity to say, in these videos, we tested the top 10. No, you did not test, you liar. You did not test these things.

You just looked at reviews. Which is actually. Some of.

This is actually a violation of the Amazon terms of service to run their product pages through an AI in order to promote your affiliate link. That is a violation of their terms of service.

But that aside, that kind of stuff, there's so much of it out there that a couple of products that I've looked for, when I saw someone using the product themselves, I see this for kitchen gadgets, for example. I enjoy being in the kitchen. There was something. I was looking up all this AI slop out there and I found a guy actually using the product.

His camera quality, his video quality was okay, his audio quality was okay. I think he might have been wearing a LAV mic, or maybe not. But I could hear him and I could understand him enough.

He didn't have studio lighting, he wasn't in a studio, but he was genuine, authentic and I could understand him. So his quality was good enough. And that sold me on the product because of all the AI slop. I just wanted a genuine opinion.

And if in those videos, if they would say, the following is generated by AI or the following is a list of the top most rated products. Like, they don't always have to say, we didn't actually review these products, although that would be good for them to do.

They could put it in more positive language to say, this is a overview of the most popular products. That's better. And that Equips me to make a better decision. Same thing.

Like what you were saying is when they don't disclose in that way, and I realize this is just more AI Slop, then I get upset, I thumb it down, and I leave.

And I'm so tempted to just comment on there, like, yet another AI Slop video, but I try to be nice on the YouTube comments, since everyone else isn't.

Well, we've all seen it because they have found some stock images of the product, probably from their website, and it's always slowly panned or slowly zoomed in because they don't have any video and they're trying to do. And then it's just this AI Voice that is explaining. And I've seen some that are. Just before AI was even remotely passable, that was just.

It was very robotic. As it explains, the New Juicer 2000 will do this. And you're like, holy cow, is this horrible?

And then it dawns on you that this may be done by somebody where English is not their first language. They're just, like you said, they're just trying to get that affiliate commission, and they're looking at what's popular. And here we go.

So now to flip the coin. I was doing a show, and Jody Kringle, who's a voiceover artist, who, as you might imagine, might have her eye on exactly what AI Is doing.

And we were talking about people using Google Notebook to do a show, and she said, if you don't want to do the show, like, just don't do the show. And when she said that, that triggered it, because there's a show I do that. I honestly don't want to do the show. And it's about Akron, Ohio.

It's called the Akron Podcast. And I was like, ooh, that I wonder if this would work. So I created an episode.

And what was interesting, it was a very sensitive subject in Akron, Ohio. Our police have a bad habit of shooting people when they shouldn't, especially white cops shooting people of color.

And the actual people of Akron, Ohio, now have to pay $4.8 million, not an insurance company, because we shot a guy 46 times. I guess the 45th, not enough or whatever.

But anyway, so I thought, well, this will be interesting because it's a sensitive subject and AI is going to describe it. So I was like, okay. And then there was another. The second story was yet another shooting that I had Kyle and Cheryl talk about it.

But I disclosed up front. And after the first story, I said, hey, I have another story about this Poor kid got shot because he had a fake gun and he was pointing it at people.

And I said, so let's hear what Kyle and Cheryl have to say about it. And off they went. So I just explained up front. I'm like, hey, these are.

I said, now I've listened to what they had to say and I've checked for accuracy. I said, but here you go. So I just put that out today. It's a very small show because I. Again, I don't really want to do this podcast at this point.

It's just a test show for me, but I'll be interested to see if I get any kind of listenership.

The interesting thing about Google Notebook is in the past, if I had thought about doing this, I would have ran the story from the local newspaper, had some sort of AI rewrite it again, check for accuracy, and then throw that script into Google Notebook. Well, Google Notebook kind of does that automatically.

You can copy and paste in text and then it just straps in and does a deep dive as they delve into whatever. So it'll be interesting to see. But I do feel somewhat of a hypocrite that I. But I'm like, no, no, I'm disclosing. I'm not a hypocrite.

And there is a place for some of that. Not from. Don't think of it completely as slop, because you are taking actual content and you're using AI to repurpose it.

What I would call AI slop is when you are creating the content almost from scratch or the opinions almost from scratch with AI, that is totally slop. But if you're repurposing, I think AI is fantastic at repurposing. But here's the thing.

The point I want to make here, you are making content more available to people who want it in that format.

So, like, if I get to a website and I see a really long article and they have an option or my browser has an option and plugin or whatever to give me an AI generated summary. I'm clicking that sometimes to see that. Actually, I'm using an email app right now called Short Wave.

I do have an affiliate link, but I'm not talking about them because I have an affiliate link. But they have this neat feature that I can press a button on an email and it will summarize that email or even an entire reply thread of emails.

It can summarize it for me or given me action points from it, or I can select multiple separate messages in my inbox and have it summarize all of those together. That's great. That is saving me time. It's giving me information in a format that's more digestible for me.

Or you visit a website that also has a lawn article, and you want every word of that article. You just don't want to read it yourself because you need to be copying and placing or clicking things and doing other stuff like that.

But you want something to listen to. So, I mean, that's. The podcast solution is if there's a button to turn that article into a podcast where you can hear the article read to you.

If it's an AI voice, I don't think that needs to be disclosed because it's just a voice.

The same way Mignon Fogarty with Grammar Girl does this in her podcast, where so often she has guest writers who contributed content, and she discloses that she says, the following is written by so and so. So when I say me, it's referring to him or her. So then she still reads it.

And she reads it in her genuine voice and with her own humor and inflection and all of that to it, but it is someone else's content. She's reading it. I think that's disclosure enough.

If an AI is simply reading content that you've generated yourself, not with AI, but you've made it yourself, that might not need to be disclosed necessarily, unless the AI is identifying itself. So here's the question to think about is where is the line of, at least with AI, where you do and don't need to disclose your use of it?

That's a great question. I think you hit one of the points, I think, are reviews. Because I remember one time I had a client and I asked him, would you have any gear yet?

And he said, yeah, I have a Podtrak P4. And then I bought a Rodecaster back when the first one came out. And I said, why do you have both of those?

And he said, well, when you talked about the Rodecaster, you said it was cool. And I was like, wait. So he spent $500 because I said something was cool? And I was like, well, it is cool.

I'm like, but if you got the other one, you kind of don't need this one, or vice versa.

And so I think that's why people like Tom Buck on YouTube and Andrew Scott, they always disclose up front whether or not, like, hey, I'm going to talk about the new sure Move Mike. And, like, Bandra. I just saw his video on that. And he was like, hey, just so you know, this is on loan from shore.

And then they always say, I'm going to give you my honest opinion one way or another. And that's where it's always, for me, I'll listen to it. And I always love that both of those guys were like, this is what we really liked.

But there is one thing, and the minute they say something remotely negative, I'm like, okay, I'm going to believe this. Now, of course, I always say you start off with two things when you start a podcast. No audience and integrity.

And so the minute I find out that you're lying, we're done. But Tom Buck actually has a. It sounds weird because he's. I look at. Tommy's a YouTuber, but he actually has a podcast. Podcast. It's an audio podcast.

And he did an episode and he was talking about how companies have come to him and go, hey, can you do a review of our product? And you know we're going to give it to you for free, but if you could not disclose that. And I'm like that.

It's just so weird that there are companies going, yeah, can we kind of keep that on the download? I'm like, well, it's a little thing we like to call illegal, you know, But I'm sure there are people like, man, I'm going to get free gear.

Sure.

And I'm like, oh, that's so bad.

I kind of feel like the line is similar to a trademark where in trademark stuff. And I've gone through this, and I'm going through this with a trademark dispute right now. It's a matter of potential confusion.

Might someone think that AI generated image is real? If so, it needs to be disclosed that it was AI generated?

Might someone think that that voice is a real person saying those real things, giving their own opinion that might need to be disclosed. If it's simply a voice doing something for you, like reading something for you, just so you have it in a different voice.

And you've never said, here's the voice of so and so, or anything like that that might not need to be disclosed.

And if you're repurposing your own content that you already created, like you, maybe you used AI to generate a bunch of social posts for you or to summarize it. I don't think you need to disclose the following summary was generated with artificial intelligence. That's a waste. I don't think you need to do that.

But when there is the potential for confusion, or especially if you are trusting the AI, blindly trusting the AI, then you definitely should Disclose it. The illustration that I like to use in one of my episodes about transcripts.

If you use AI to do a transcript, you need to be careful with certain things because sometimes the AI or the transcript engine won't hear something correctly. And there are certain cases where that could lead to major problems. An example I like is you might say, I love two little puppies.

Or you might slur it, saying, I love two little puppies. The AI might hear that and it thinks you said, I love to kill puppies.

Right.

And that can lead you to legal hot water. So if you don't audit and edit, you could get in trouble.

Yeah, I'm with you. I think the biggest mistake is a having it generate the content. I always like the way you said it was assisted intelligence.

So have it brush up on the content that you created with and then from. I think that's the best use of AI And. But I also like your point.

Like, for me, when I think about it, it's just really just reading the facts that I gave it. And so it's not really throwing in opinion. And I was really glad to see that both Kyle and Cheryl thought killing people was bad.

I was like, yay, Kyle and Cheryl. So that was good. So I think that it's.

When you, like you said, when you get into opinions, and if somebody's going to take action on your words, it would be good to know if it's some AI tool.

Yeah.

With AI especially, it can hallucinate, as they say, and so either it can get something wrong, it heard something wrong, it could get a fact wrong, it can make up things. Like I loved hearing in the no Agenda podcast recently, where I think it was John C.

Dvorak did this, where he took Notebook LM from Google and he ran something through it and then he got the transcript and he ran that back through Notebook LM again. I can't remember how many times he did that.

It was twice.

Only twice? Yeah. And ended up with some definitely hallucinated information in there. It's like playing the game of telephone.

This was about when the pagers exploded.

Oh, yeah.

And so they took that and had it transcribed and then ran it through back again. The final output after basically running it through itself twice was they were talking about exploding electronic devices.

And it wasn't very like they lost some of the specifics. And there was one. I don't know if they called it a Walkman. Yeah. But it was something. It's like, oh, now we're in the realm of not even close.

And that's why Adam is all about, yeah, just give us more AI slop. Because it's just going to be bad. And anybody who does more than clicking a button is going to stand out.

So I tend to agree with that opinion because I've. I've just heard some things. I'm like, ooh, that's. That's not good.

But then you look at things like, if you use an AI to generate a title for you, I don't think you need to disclose that. If your AI made the chapters for you, I don't think you need to disclose that.

There are lots of things that AI can do that I don't think you need to disclose. And, like, also, you know, people are using AI image makers to make their podcast cover art. I think that's fine. You don't have to disclose that.

That's AI. This is all opinion, by the way. So a disclaimer here. We are not lawyers. We have certain experience anyways, but we are not actual lawyers.

So this is not legal advice. But my impression is that these types of things, if it's obvious it's not real, you don't have to disclose it.

It's just like, I don't have to say whether I used Adobe Photoshop or GIMP if I edited an image, but if I make that image look real and it's something obviously fake, obviously not real, then I should disclose that that is a parody in some way. You look at, like, the Babylon Bee, one of my favorite sites on the Internet right now, hilarious stuff comes from the Babylon Bee.

And they have all of these funny images that they make with their articles, and it is obviously satire. So they don't have to say this image in this article is satire, because that's what it is. That's their whole brand. Same thing with the Onion.

And there is a case right now with, I think it's gone all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Babylon Bee has been involved, The Onion has been involved.

But, like, defending the right to do parody because some people are saying someone might get misled by this idea that this happened. Or there's that.

The example I'm thinking of, there's the one where Jesus flipping over the tables because there's an account in Scripture of when Jesus cast out the money changers in the temple, and he said, you turned the temple of God into a den of thieves. And so he flipped over, like, pushed over the tables and cast them out. But then what did the AI make?

It's a big picture of Jesus Basically doing a backflip over a table.

So it's like the AI understood your words, but it didn't understand the idea. But if you did something like that, you know, pick a politician, any politician.

Politician steals candy from a baby, here's photographic proof that's going to get you in trouble.

Yeah. And I think it goes back to what you said earlier about confusion. So when you make.

I know, I think it was Taylor Swift, but they're insert any female celebrity.

And the minute you get popular, it's probably a rite of passage, which is just sad that the minute you get popular, naked pictures of you are going to pop up. And it's weird because I think everybody knows they're fake, but it's naked people. So. And it's just.

So that's the again where you get into trouble, where you're like, oh, this actually looks real because he or she is on a boat and this might be that. And you know, that's when you're going to get a trouble.

The trouble is more than just the pixels. It's the ideas, it's the connotations, it's the feelings, the other things beyond just the pixels themselves.

And bringing it back to other kinds of disclosures, too.

These days with financial disclosures, whether you're being compensated for something or you have some kind of association with something, like while I was on the advisory board for Captivate, I disclosed, whenever I was talking about Captivate, I would disclose. I am an affiliate and I'm also on the advisory board.

And you have done this a lot, Dave, while you were with Libsyn, whenever you would talk about media hosting providers, whether positive or negative, you would disclose that you work for Libsyn. And yet the way you've disclosed that and the way that you talk about other things, I think boosted your reputation.

So it didn't make people think, oh, Dave is just saying this bad thing about them because he works for Libsyn, or he's just saying this good thing because he works for Libsyn.

But because you were honest, because you shared the good and the bad on both sides of whatever you were talking about, that made the disclosure boost your reputation. And I think we're going to see in the future more disclosures required.

I think that for sure, the use of AI, there's going to be some need for disclosures in that from a legal perspective, I think that's coming in probably the next couple of years. There will be some kind of guideline or a law that you'll need to disclose.

But it will probably be somewhere along those lines of when someone might confuse it or it might mislead someone or something like that. We also have the laws already about financial disclosures. If you're being compensated about something and even if you're not in the United States.

The FTC guidelines are interesting in that they say basically, if you do business with anyone that's in the United States or have the potential to profit from anyone in the United States, you still need to disclose.

But I think they're good guidelines anyway, and we'll have a link to them in the notes so you can look over them even if you're not in the United States. But there isn't a completely good way, a standard way to disclose that works every time.

And that's why one of the things that I proposed just recently in the podcast Namespace Talk in Podcasting 2.0 is a podcast disclosure tag that would allow you to add these disclosures in your RSS feed. Now, that will not be enough right now.

What that would do is for the apps that would someday read that when that standard is accepted and finalized and everything if it is, that would allow the apps to support that, to make those disclosures more prominent. And there could be certain ways that you could make that especially more prominent and contextually relevant.

Like maybe you could tie a disclosure to a chapter.

So while you are talking about a product that you earn commissions from, there's a disclosure or during an ad, even there's it says it in the chapter and such. This is an ad. Now, ads, I think, are obvious that they're advertisements. Most of the time it's obvious.

And if it's not obvious in your own podcast, then you need to make it obvious that it is an ad. You are being paid to talk about that thing. So you need to make that obvious in some way.

And there are production ways to do that or things that you can say to do that to make that obvious. But I think that extra context can help people.

And yes, this does open up the door for systems someday in the future to detect when and where the ads are in your episode. But that's going to happen anyway. That is happening anyway. And in a way that's actually going to help you.

Because as technology is going in the direction of being able to detect when people hear ads, if they're going to skip the ad anyway, the sponsor shouldn't have to pay for it because they're not getting what they're paying for. They're paying for the actual impressions. So that could make Realistic impressions. Even more valuable, I would hope, but.

So I've proposed this podcast disclosure tag that it's a very rough proposal right now. I'd love some comments on it from anyone who just sees it and has some ideas of different ways that could be implemented.

But I tried to build it around this idea of different types of disclosures as well as different contexts for those disclosures. So in my own example that I gave in the code, I gave the examples of three different types of disclosure. Compensation, AI and association.

AI is obvious. It's if you're using AI for something that needs to be disclosed.

Compensation is if you're compensated in any way for that thing, financial compensation, you're earning points, you were given something, you are paid, it's a sponsored ad or something like that. Any kind of compensation would fit under that kind of disclosure.

And association would be the thing where you are associated like you're employed, you own stock, you're on the advisory board, you founded the company, anything like that, you're related to this person, you're married to this person, or they're your brother, sister, son, daughter, whatever. Any kind of association like that. Those are some types that, that I thought of in the examples I was making.

And then you could also think about adding a context to these which I put in the code examples so you could clarify where this is relevant for compensation.

The context could be links and in my example I wrote some of the products slash services in this episode use affiliate links that compensate the podcaster for qualifying purchases. It could be even like a context of content and that could refer to the entire content of your episode or a portion of content.

Like if you have, you know, the tip of the day is brought to you in part by orange juice drink some today. Well, that could be in the disclosure is that you are compensated for that piece of content. Or it could be just outright an ad is the context.

It could also be certain things like the images that were in there and to disclose this episode uses realistic looking AI generated images, or this episode contains parody, anything like that. These are disclosures, not disclaimers.

Disclaimer is when you're saying I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, this is not financial advice, that's a disclaimer.

But a disclosure is if you are a lawyer or you need to disclose that or you're related to something, you're being compensated or in certain cases if you're using tools, that kind of thing needs to be disclosed.

Certain kinds of tools like AI is what I'm Talking about, or maybe if you're using a product and talking about a product that was given to you by the company in hopes that you would do like right now I'm podcasting with an electro voice RE320 that goes into a original first generation Rodecast Pro. Both the microphone and the Rodecaster Pro were given to me by their respective companies.

They were given to me with no expectation that I would do a review. They were given to me out of appreciation because I already said nice things about their products.

And so they said, hey, we want to give Daniel one of our products so he can have one. And when I talk about them, especially if I talk about my use of them, I try to make sure that I disclose these were given to me.

Nonetheless, I recommend things that I truly believe in regardless of earnings. That's my little thing that I say so much.

Now, it's a text expander snippet, but this technical proposal for a disclosure tag I think could be great because then there's less chance for someone to miss the disclosure. And that's a big important thing on the legal aspect is the disclosures have to be prominent.

Well, that would be it because I mean, to play devil's advocate, right, we already have an explicit tag and that is completely self regulated. And if somebody hears a show that should obviously be explicit, you can report that to Apple. The difference is we all know what explicit sounds like.

Not everybody may be able to go, oh, that's Kyle and Cheryl, that's AI. And so that's going to be the tricky part is kind of policing those people that don't follow the rules.

But it'll be interesting because I know already from the very first time I heard Google Notebook to now, that's already better than it used to be. They breathe now they occasionally chuckle. It's interesting how they've boosted that. I'm sure.

I know you can now go in and tell them the angle, what you want them to talk about. And eventually you're going to be able to pick somebody besides Kyle and Cheryl because not everybody sounds like Kyle and Cheryl.

And who knows, maybe someday you'll be able to, you know, this whole show will be AI, just me and Daniel and we'll say here make make Dave kind of tired in this episode, make Daniel super bounce off the walls kind of thing. It'll be interesting to see.

So when it comes to like certain things, I know some people have said, what does this mean?

Like if I use AI Tic Descript, for example, one of the beautiful features that Descript and a couple other tools offer is the overdubbing feature, as some call it, or certain things like that, where you can use an AI that's trained on your voice to fix something that you said. I think that's okay. That you probably don't have to disclose it because it was a mistake. You're simply correcting it.

You could do the same thing by re recording it. Yeah, it might not sound as smooth, but if you're very skilled at what you do or if you time it right, you can make it sound as smooth.

But that doesn't have to be disclosed. You're not changing the content, you're not misleading someone with it.

But if you were to use the AI to make someone say something different, that's when it gets into trouble.

And even when it comes to, like, the Kyle and Cheryl voices, if you're simply using them on your own content and you fully edited the script and all of that, should you still disclose, probably because of this. Where else do Kyle and Cheryl appear?

And what kind of impression is that going to give the people who hear Kyle and Cheryl, will they start thinking, oh, man, this Kyle and Cheryl, they do great podcasts. I want to find more podcasts by them. I hope I can meet them someday. And then you discover they're fake. They were fake all along.

They're on the Wiccan show.

Yeah.

It's like, wait, what? Cheryl's a witch. I didn't know that. Yeah. So that could be a little bit of a problem in a weird, spooky kind of way.

It'll be fun to watch and see where it goes and see which lines it cross. And I think I know james cridlin@podnews.net somebody. Oh, it was Listen Notes. Our good friends at Listen Notes had come up with some sort of tool.

And I want to say it was already. It was either 208 or 802. My brain's going dyslexic on this.

But either way, it was A lot of shows were already using Google Notebook and I was like, oh, well, this is not unique at all. So it'll be interesting to see if they win Podcaster of the Year next year. They're like, these guys are productive.

They're, you know, I've done probably somewhere between 20 and 30 podcasts and tried and then shut them down. These guys are on 70 shows and they're still going. They're all still current. Yeah.

And you mentioned some stats just now. I think certain stuff around that needs to be disclosed.

More in the future, too, because we are seeing so much, I think, especially more in the recent years than before. But how people can lie with statistics and the way that you tell the story around the data.

Sometimes just the way a question is worded in a survey can affect how people answer it.

So I think when it comes to, like, survey data, people should disclose what the exact question was and the exact answers that were given, and then you can summarize it from there, you can abbreviate it or whatever. But I think that's really helpful to know because I sometimes call myself Mr. Caveat.

I start thinking of all of these caveats to things, and people know that from the Audacity to podcast, I give lots of caveats and alternatives and all of that kind of stuff. That's kind of why I started the show, because I felt like, hey, wait, wait, wait, there's a caveat there to what you're not covering this caveat.

Some of that stuff you might need to disclose from content perspective. So don't just think of it as financial or AI and that kind of thing, but think about it from this perspective.

And this is really, I think, the crux of all of this. What does the audience need to know that will help them make a better decision of how to process the content or take action?

What is it that they need to know? What is that extra context that they need? That's the kind of thing that a disclosure should cover.

Yeah. On a. An article on listennotes.com they said just last weekend. So this came out at the beginning of the month. So it's been more than that now.

But they'd already deleted 500 fake shows that were created with Notebook LM. I may have to realize that, yes, I'm playing and I'm experimenting, but the Akron podcast may lose our listen notes listed because I've done this.

So we shall see.

And I'm not so sure there's a place to just cut things out because they're AI.

Because again, it could be that by being an AI voiceover, it is truly making content accessible, both from the perspective of just, I don't have the time to sit down and read this. I'd rather listen to it.

But also accessible in the accessibility perspective of someone who's visually impaired, wants to listen, has to listen to the article, read to them, and maybe they just really do not want to hear the article verbatim. They could retain the information and take action on it. So much better if they hear a conversation around the content.

Like, that's what Notebook LM is doing is it's turning basically monologue content into a dialogue that isn't usually adding much to it in terms of value. It is adding fluff, we could call it.

But it is fluff that is more personable and because of that can make it more relatable, more actionable for some people.

Yeah. And the part that's kind of scary is many podcasts with actual people on them take really wide tangents.

And to their credit, Google Notebook is somewhat staying on topic. There are some things we might actually learn from this. So maybe I don't care that today is the two year anniversary that you got your dog.

That's a real thing. I listened to six minutes of a show this week and they, they explained what they were drinking. They talked about the anniversary of the dog.

I forget what else, but I was just like, they didn't. They barely announced what the show was. So there are things that maybe we could learn from getting to the point and you know, just the facts.

Maybe so we shall see.

And speaking of disclosures, we received a thousand sats from someone in a booster grammar. So there's your disclosure for that. Dave, what did we receive?

Yeah, from Creativity Found came a bit late to this episode holiday listening and liked the discussion around what or more differently you can do with a podcast format. So a your back catalog still works. So keep that in mind. They continue on.

I've planned a step by step course format around the features of podcasting 2.0. Yay. With explainer episodes where guests tell me what the thing is and why it's good.

Then practical episodes teaching the listener how to do the thing. It's still a talk show, but we'll use the 2.0 features to teach the 2.0 features inspired by books I've worked on as a text editor.

And that is from Claire. So thank you, Claire. That's awesome. Very meta.

Yeah. And we both got to contribute to her series as well, so we might have a link to that in the notes. I can't, I don't know if it's published yet.

I think it's publishing around the same time this episode is publishing, so we might be able to link to that. Some of our contributions, like I got to talk about chapters there and others have been involved as well. So love what Claire is doing.

Thank you for those stats.

Yeah, thank you very much. And I think that is going to do it for this episode. Episode 52 is in the can again.

Our website futureofpodcasting.net keep boosting and keep podcasting.