How Open Channels FM Balances Human Content with the AI Transparency Report

Bob Dunn:

Well, today I want to share with you something I did. And before I get into that, let me just touch slightly on transparency. Transparency in business, transparency in life. We all have our own opinions. I may have shared some in the past, but the reality is I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. I’m mentioning it for a specific reason, because I’ve just created our first AI transparency report on Open Channels FM.

Why? Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and to be honest with you, I didn’t research it to see if companies are doing this now or how it’s being handled, because I just, yeah, didn’t want to spend the time. This was something I thought, I’m just going to do it. I didn’t ask Claude or anybody else to help me with it, to give me some thoughts. I just pretty much spelled it out how it is here. So I felt it was important because of all the content we do create on our site. And that’s what I’m specifically talking about, the AI transparency report of our content.

As you know, or you may not, all of our podcast episodes are made by humans. That means there is someone actually sitting behind the mic. And to be honest, just like the one you heard just moments ago, the ad rolls are personally read by me for every show or episode. So the original content is just that, original. Very little of it is scripted, except maybe for the ad rolls.

On all of our posts on the episodes, yes, we have show notes, we have transcriptions, and all of this content, yes, is AI-generated. I like to think of the age-old method of repurposing content. You have this great content, and like so many of us think, hey, we want to get it out there in different ways, different formats. And I’ve always been one for transcriptions. We’ve had transcriptions on the podcast from the very beginning. I like to add show notes. I add a few other things, and I use a platform called Castmagic to generate all that content. And then I run some stuff, especially the transcripts, through Claude, just for grammatical fixes and especially paragraph breaks in the transcripts. Initially, all this content, when you land there, is checked and finalized by me. So I’ll go through it and make sure there’s nothing there that shouldn’t be there. And that’s it. I mean, that’s the content there.

The blog posts. Yes, we do a blog post. And interestingly enough, I’ve changed that a little bit just recently. There’s really 2 kinds of blog posts we do on the site. One of them is repurposed content from the particular shows. I may pull out a specific part of a conversation and generate a blog post out of that. I do this primarily for the reason of, hey, there’s a lot of content in there that doesn’t get, you know, wrapped up in a way that maybe is easy for you to read and consume. So yeah, I do that. I have Castmagic generate one with some prompts, and then I have Claude actually just do again kind of a spell check and see if anything grammatically is wrong with it. And then I do the final look over.

Now, the other blog posts are blog posts I write. Yes, I don’t do anything via AI. I just literally write a blog post like we used to do. So those are really the two. And I was thinking, how do I separate those? Because again, that little bit of transparency was coming at me. And so the name I use, my name, Bob Dunn, is on the posts that I write. The byline for the other ones is Open Channels FM, and there’s a disclaimer at the end of the post. Let me just read that for you, just because you may see it sometime if you’re in there ever on a blog post. “Posts under this byline are adapted from Open Channels FM episodes, are drafted with the help of AI, from the episode transcript and reviewed before publishing.”

Also, I’m going to skip ahead a little bit. I did mention on our disclaimer that we use Jetpack AI for both search and site chat, which is pretty obvious. I mean, nobody’s going to be surprised or freaked out about that. Then I didn’t even get into site management, you know, anything to do with the mechanics of the site or anything that I do related to the site, and if that is used by AI or not, because typically that doesn’t really fit under our content.

Now, when I do a featured image or an image or graphic, to be honest, I’ve been there. I’ve tried this whole AI-generated stuff, and I feel like not only did it get weird often, especially if you tried to generate it with people in it that are taken from the video and it says, yeah, just use them as they are. You know, the expressions were bizarre, the whatever. And then of course, some of the AI made them look, I don’t even want to say, some of them were unrecognizable. So long story short, I went through a lot of time trying to find certain tools, certain AI tools, Riverside, others, that would do this for what I need. And I found out I was spending more time than going into Canva like I always did, using their tools, not their AI tools, using templates, creating a template, and just putting my title in. And it really probably doesn’t take me any longer than trying to go back and forth with AI to say, oh, you didn’t get that right. Why did you spell that word that way? Et cetera, et cetera. So it’s possible for me to do that. I have tools just about everywhere that have some AI video or image production, and I just haven’t used them. It doesn’t say I never will, but for now, I just don’t find the use for it.

Wrapping back around, we have an AI transparency report on our site now. Whether this is going to be something that people are doing because I did it, I don’t know. But will it be a requirement soon? I just felt I wanted to be transparent on that part of our site. Not telling you to do it, not saying if you don’t do it, you’re hiding something. Hey, it’s all personal choice and what you want to do. And this is what I chose to do. So that’s it. You can check it out on our site. It’s a little bit different than I explained here, but hey, it always is.