Podcasting Meets AI Shifting Formats, Editing, and Ethics

Bob Dunn Dunn:
Hey, welcome to Open Channels FM Podcast Network. We are on channel 4 today, and I have a special guest, actually a returning guest, Bud Krause. Bud is coming in to Oh, he brought an idea, but I think I’ll let him say hello.

Bud Kraus:
So yeah, my name is Bud Krause. I’m the host of Seriously Bud, and that’s a podcast where I feature an unexpected conversation each week for somebody in the WordPress community. It’s not a tech talk. It’s a talk about, you know, people’s lives and their life stories.

Bob Dunn:
Very cool. So what do you have on the table for us? I know you had something you wanted to bring in and talk about.

Bud Kraus:
Well, you know, like everybody’s talking about AI. We have AI exhaustion. I hope not, because we’re going to be talking about AI and podcasting here, because it’s certainly like every other industry is transforming what podcasting is, how it’s done, promoted, etc.

Bob Dunn:
Okay, very cool. There was an interesting comment that Robert Jacobi, our host of Open Channels News, he started it out saying, we start the topic out with AI. Of course, we talk about AI on every day of the week that ends with a Y. So think about that. You know, that’s pretty much it.

Bud Kraus:
I know. I just say it’s a fad and it’ll blow over.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? So anyway, so back to podcasting and AI. So why don’t you kick it off with just, yeah, just a little bit of thought or You know, one thing is that podcasting and AI, it really is turning this industry into—

Bud Kraus:
podcasting is a multimedia phenomenon now. It isn’t just audio, what you and I, Bob Dunn, have thought about forever. It’s video, it’s text, it’s all kinds of things. Spotify seems to be doing a lot of very interesting things. For example, you can now— and I haven’t done this, so full disclosure, I’ve read about it. Thank you, AI. That you can now, as a user, of course, it’s changing the user experience with podcasting. So now users in Spotify can talk or query or prompt an episode and say, hey, does so-and-so say something about so-and-so? So they don’t have to listen to the whole episode anymore. That’s an important thing to know. They can just jump to the spot that they want to listen to, which is really cool. So it’s sort of like, you know, we’ve had chapter markers all along that you can click on and listen to. Now you can just say, oh, does Bob Dunn talk about when he was a bartender? And you can just, you know, skip to that part. So yeah, that’s doing—

Another thing it’s doing too, which is really cool, I think, is so we create podcasts that have sponsorships, right? And they live forever with the sponsor. You know, let’s say at the top of the podcast or in mid-roll or whatever. Now, what Spotify is doing is you can, with AI, change the sponsorship on, let’s say, a podcast you did like 2 years ago, because we know that podcasts have long shelf lives. And so that you don’t have to live with that sponsor forever. You can just say, all right, I wanna change from this date to this date. this sponsor to that sponsor and bang, it’s done. Now, I don’t know the exact mechanics of how that’s all done, but the concept is easy to follow.

Which gives new life. It changes a lot of things, doesn’t it? Because sponsors usually think that their ad will stay in that podcast forever. Well, not necessarily, you can change it. So yeah, that’s a thing that people have to be, if you’re doing podcasts now, beware of with your sponsors that all that can change. What do you think of that?

Bob Dunn:
You know, I’ve, I went back and forth on Castos. We were talking about it earlier. That’s a podcast hosting company I use. And they have the same thing as far as being able to do that. And for new podcasters, I think it’s great because You basically, from what I understand, is you, when you do this, you definitely have to have a hard start and stop because you need to cleanly put it in. Myself, over, God, what, 8 years, when I put in a mid-roll, I have the music start a little earlier.

And then it segues in. I just like that. Well, I couldn’t do that with those because it would, cut off that music and it wouldn’t no longer have that smooth segue. So I think it’s a really great idea if, I mean, if somebody wants to make the shift to it. Myself, I’ve thought about it and I thought, hey, you know, I’m 8 years into it. I’ll be lucky to do another 8 years. So I think at this point I’ll just kind of keep it to, hey, your stuff stays in there. But it’s a, you know, it is a good selling point. And on an added topic, which is not AI at all, the one thing I have done is, and this took quite a bit of time because I had to go into all my past posts, but my site is on WordPress and there’s a thing called a pattern. A lot of people don’t understand that, but you can create this block pattern that changes once it’s in. the content, you know, it can be changed. You can go in and change it in one place and everything’s changed. Well, I’ve done that for my call to actions in all my posts. So all current sponsors are always in the call to action if they land on the post versus, you know, being old ones or whatever that were there before our previous sponsors. So in my case, Sponsors, the only time they live on, on our site beyond their sponsorship is within the podcast. And I, yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a good option if that’s what you want to do. If it’s something you— And if I was starting today with what I’m doing right now, I probably would consider it more.

Bud Kraus:
Well, I use patterns for that very same reason. So if I want to swap out a sponsor, You just change the pattern. It’s just been done throughout the entire site.

You know, one thing that I think AI is bringing, not just to podcasting, but just in general, but certainly, well, just about to everything, is what I call the, well, what do I call this thing? The transmutification, is that a word? Of file formats. That is, aren’t we losing track or touch of what a file format is? We don’t really need to know really anymore if it’s audio, video, text, whatever, because all this is so interchangeable, right? Audio is text, text is audio, video is this. There’s no longer really those hard boundaries. This is an audio file. I just like, just no. If I take something in an audio file and say, well, I don’t have time to listen to this, we’ll just have one of these AIs translate it into a transform it into text, and then you could take that text and transform that into an image, and then you could take that image and make it into a video. So you get the point, which is, I think we’re losing track of, or the boundaries between file formats are totally getting blurred, which is, I think, really cool.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but it’s very true. Yeah.

Bud Kraus:
You want to hear another kind of cool thing that I thought thought about the other day?

Bob Dunn:
Sure, why not?

Bud Kraus:
Which is an AI thing. Okay, why not? Since I’m on a hot streak here. So I think that the operating systems of the future will be nothing but an AI prompt. That’s it. That’s gonna be your computer. You don’t need applications anymore as we have thought about. Click on this, click on that. You’ll just talk, type input into that prompt, and everything will take place. I don’t— we’re not there yet, but I think that’s where we’re going with it. operating system.

Bob Dunn:
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised just with what it does, what people use it for, and yeah, moving into the future and stuff.

Bud Kraus:
And yeah, well, I think about that. So like we all kind of do, you know.

Bob Dunn:
I don’t think about it that much, so I’m glad you’re thinking about it.

Bud Kraus:
Well, you know, I have time on my hands, obviously, to be— but, you know, like you, I talk to a lot of people and they give me input for ideas, like what I just did and stuff like that. But going back to the podcasting thing and AI, Another thing that’s changing, obviously, and I don’t know if this— well, this is partly because of AI too, is video. So the idea that, you know, and you and I don’t really like this because we’re kind of traditionalists here, but the role of YouTube in podcasting is growing for many, for the sort of the obvious reason, like look who owns it. But yeah. And as You mentioned, can we mention this about the 1-second view?

Bob Dunn:
Oh yeah, sure. Something I just read. I think it was just something they put out. In fact, a few YouTubers have talked about it and they don’t like it actually, some of them.

Yeah. And that was, and I’m sure a lot of people that are into YouTube a lot or at least produce on it probably learned that recently. YouTube is now, if somebody watches one frame and it’s always interesting if you ever actually see all the frames that your video has, that’s considered a view. And I saw a YouTuber on there basically saying this is absolutely the most stupid thing they’ve ever done to their algorithm. And I can see why, because you can no longer use that metric Yeah. For any kind of proof.

Bud Kraus:
Yeah, because it’s meaningless. Let me just say like one sec. You know, another thing about, you know, AI and podcasting is sort of the changing ethics and the landscape of what’s all that about. For example, if I can, well, I would love to do this, use your voice instead of mine for my— you wouldn’t like that, would you, Bob Dunn?

Bob Dunn:
No, you wouldn’t. No, no, I, well, sure, go for it.

Bud Kraus:
But I would love to use your voice instead of mine seriously. But that’s the point, that people can start using other people’s voice, generating artificial synthetic voices. Whoa. I think you’re going to run into all kinds of— we already are running into all kinds of issues with generative voices. And yeah, that’s a lot of stuff that’s going to be sorted out in the years to come, if not already in the courts. I’m sure some of that stuff already is.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, yeah, I’ve read some about that because there are actually platforms out there now that will just automate, you know, you want a podcast, it’ll just—

Bud Kraus:
Oh yeah.

Bob Dunn:
Do the whole thing.

Bud Kraus:
Those kinds of podcasts which are just generated by AI have very low— it’s AI slop, if you will, to cut to the chase, that advertisers aren’t really going to use that stuff or not. They don’t want to use it because it’s, you gonna hurt their brand. It’s just junk. You got to do like real people. See, that’s what I sort of like about what we’re doing is that I don’t think we can yet be replaced. We can be changed a bit. We can be repurposed, but we can’t— the original content still has to be created by human beings. I think right now, at least, you know.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. And I think It’s— and I’ve read the same thing. I’ve read where even the ones that are going out on platforms, and I can’t remember if it was Apple or who reported it, but said that they’re the least listened to. People are not wanting to listen to that, you know, the time they spend listening to podcasts.

They still want to hear somebody. And they’re, you know, until AI, I don’t even know if AI, I mean, it can, but There’s always going to be, you know, well, you’d prompt it to say, well, screw up every once in a while, put in some ums or something to make it sound more real.

Bud Kraus:
Oh, it does?

Bob Dunn:
Yeah.

Bud Kraus:
And it’s—

Bob Dunn:
Oh, you can do that?

Bud Kraus:
Yeah.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. It’s so, yeah, it’s so formatted. And so, so, and, you know, the one thing I do think, though, is that could have a place The purpose of it is to basically vomit out content that is very—

Bud Kraus:
Technical stuff.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, content that is very— it’s almost like a tutorial or a step-by-step guide of doing something. You know, it could work there because we’re already listening to it in other factions. You know, where it’s, you know, because some stuff Doesn’t have to absolutely have the human touch. It could be just— it’s almost like taking a technical document and having somebody do that instead or make it into something. So yeah, that’s probably where it’s inching in more. But yeah.

Bud Kraus:
I’ll give you a case in point. Now, I don’t think you’ve experimented in this direction, but I have. So for my 100th episode, I figured like, what am I going to do? Let me do something with AI. What a shock. So I put all my episodes into Notebook, or what it’s called, Gemini. What is it called now? Gemini Notebook? Yeah, or whatever. And I said to it, and this thing can do just amazing things. And I said, create 2 characters, Adam and Eve, and let them have a conversation about the first 100 episodes. And here’s the format, and here are the questions to ask each other, and whatever. You know, you put And it gave me a 20-minute episode of 2 artificial characters who sounded very human. This is not, this is not your, this is not your grandfather’s AI voices.

Bob Dunn:
No, this isn’t the robotic voice type thing. No.

Bud Kraus:
No, no, very real. Okay. And it was listenable. I thought it was pretty good. And of course, and I published it, but the point is this content can be repurposed in so many different directions. Case in point, I’ll give you another one. So what I wanna do, from my website, that’s seriouslybud.com. Want to repeat that, Bud?

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, seriouslybud.com.

Bud Kraus:
All right, so I want you to be able to go there. I’m working on this and just do like, ask Bud, and you can query or you could add, you know, there’ll be a prompt and you can say, uh, what people discussed, you know, or put together a little, uh, story of all the people that just, that talked about England or English accents and, you know, or life in Germany or— in other words, the podcast is now, it’s such a, I think, great source of the people who built WordPress and the WordPress community, but their stories, their personal stories, that if I were coming to my site, I may want to use it either for research or understanding or to— To create some interest or whatever. Maybe write a blog post based on something that was commonly said on my show. So, I mean, it’s really, it’s just the stuff now we’re at the— it’s only, you’re only limited by your imagination. The technology really isn’t limiting you. It’s your own brain that’s limiting. I mean, unfortunately, yeah. What do you think?

Bob Dunn:
You know, actually, this is funny because I haven’t made it public yet. It’s on my site.

Bud Kraus:
Gonna break a little news here.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, I’m coming up here with episode 800 soon. So I’m doing a bunch of release stuff on that episode. One of the things is I have a modal, a live chat now on my site that is Down in the left corner. The thing is, I’m— it’s just a little emblem. I want it to say chat with or whatever, but it is so damn cool. You can do exactly— because I figure I have 800.

Bud Kraus:
Oh, you can do this now?

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. And so I actually— and I’ll tell you, it’s— it was customized through Jetpack, which is a WordPress plugin, Site Chat. It’s called. And what’s very cool is you can go in and do that. You can basically have a conversation back and forth and ask, you know, what was talked about this and stuff. But also what’s really cool about it is it’ll prompt some questions on it. And those questions are based on the page you’re on, the content. So if you’re reading—

Bud Kraus:
Right. Oh, that is cool.

Bob Dunn:
If you listen to an episode about Right. England, maybe in your case. It might come in and say, anything else you want to know about England or something like that? It’s on the site and it’s working and it’s so cool. I was in there just asking stuff and it was coming up with—

Bud Kraus:
Oh, man.

Bob Dunn:
Really cool stuff. So if anybody wants to try, if they go to openchannels.fm and you go in the lower left corner, there’s this kind of little emblem dot. I think it’s like an emblem for chat for myself. It’s kind of, you know, it’s not I need it to stand out a little bit more, which is what I’m working on, or somebody else is actually working on. But it is, it is. I’ve had this idea for about 18 months of doing a, a conversational chat. And so I use Jetpack AI Search. That is great in itself. It does more like the search you get when you go on another search. It gives you, you know, links and it gives you the narrative and then— stuff like that. But this is, this is so cool because this is what I’ve dreamed of the last 18 months. And, and what’s really ironic about it, when we first thought about it, I was having somebody that was going to build a very custom conversational chat for it. Well, you know what’s happened. Probably that could have even been 2 years ago. What happened in 2 years?

And so when we finally revisited it, we knew it was time. The tools were in place. And so it can be a resource for people because, hey, I don’t even care if you come there and just do that just to maybe learn something or about something or whatever.

Bud Kraus:
I don’t have time for the 800 episodes, although I think I’ve listened to them all. No, I haven’t. You’ve listened to them all, I think. But I haven’t. But Bob Dunn, here’s what I want to know. How do you deal with the source material? Does your site— does this— do you store I mean, how— yeah, that’s what I want. Where’s the source information?

Bob Dunn:
What it works from is my transcripts, all my notes. And so it’s— and I put a lot of stuff. Yeah, because currently, if somebody goes to the post, they will get, you know, the basic intro notes, but they also get takeaways. And this is all generated, AI-generated stuff. I have no shame in saying that because I’m basically repurposing this audio to give you more information. And I have one that questions that were answered in this episode. And so I have all this content and then the transcription. People, if people go there and don’t even listen, but go through all that stuff or pull out something, to me, that’s a winner. You know, I don’t need them to listen. I just want that information to be out there to as many people as possible.

Bud Kraus:
I understand this. That is so cool. See, but what it’s doing is reading or using the source info. The source data is coming solely from what’s in your database.

I have a different situation where my episodes are stored externally and not in my site, and I want it to read some kind of— the source material will be from an external source, not through my own WordPress site. But I will, you know, that’s stuff that, you know, I’ll ask AI to help me with so I can work that. But here’s the thing, the tool, like you said, The key thing that you said is the tools are there. 18 months ago, you’re talking about customizing this and that. You don’t have to do anything like that now.

Bob Dunn:
You know, the one thing that I’ve gone back to is images. So I, you know, creating featured images for my— it’s like I have not ever been happy with an AI image, no matter what I’ve tried and the prompt. And I mean, there’s some amazing images, but I’ve been going back to just using Canva because I can create an image and like, you know, if I have a template, I just change it out. Takes me an extra 2 or 3 minutes. And, you know, I’ve talked to others about this whole thing. I don’t want to lose The small processes that, you know, my brain needs to keep working on things like that.

Bud Kraus:
Okay, I got one for you. Okay, because you and I have talked about editing and editing and editing. I once asked you, how much time does it take to edit? And you said, well, how much time do you got, kid? I can’t do your voice. Anyway, it is really true. How much time do you want to spend? But Are you using AI at all to assist you in your editing process?

Bob Dunn:
Okay, so I use riverside.io. And it has several different things you can do, AI magic, or I don’t know, they have some name for it or something.

Bud Kraus:
Remove filler words. I’m sorry to interrupt. But yeah, the easy stuff, right? You move filler words, right? Go ahead. Yeah, yeah.

Bob Dunn:
Filler words, it has, you know, you can eliminate any spaces over a certain time, pauses. So I’ve tried them all. Removing the filler words, I don’t like because you end up having to do them one at a time anyway, in a sense, because they’re run-on words. So it sounds too clipped.

Bud Kraus:
Mm-hmm.

Bob Dunn:
And I figure that’s part of human speech. You know, it’s like, deal with it. So that I’ve used and I’m not using anymore. The removing of the pauses, if somebody pauses for a while, became— no matter how much I experimented with that, it was clipping it. It sounded like people were not taking that natural little bit of time to think, and it sounded weird. I’m probably more picky than some people.

Bud Kraus:
Yeah, but that’s what makes you good. Yeah.

Bob Dunn:
And one time it automatically did something and it was supposed to eliminate the spaces and it eliminated some words randomly too. So I had to go through and I had to find way to go back, revision history and everything, but it was a mess. It actually started pulling out just normal words every once in a while.

And it just screwed everything up. The one thing I do use is being able to get a bit of the background, or if it’s a really, you know, a lot of echo, I use that. It’s called Magic Voice, or I don’t know, some silly thing like that. But you’ve got a 0 to 100%, so you can find that sweet spot where it doesn’t sound Because it can get really weird and it doesn’t quite sound normal. That’s the only one I use right now.

Bud Kraus:
How about you? My technique is this. I have 2 passes that I make for every show. The first one is sort of a generalized listen and cut out, not over-talking, but cut out long pauses, things like You know, like stutter— not stuttering, but I wanted to say that kind of thing, you know, where you— a lot of users say, right. So I do that. So I— and then the second edit is a refinement where I will then look at both tracks and then cut out, uh, over-talking where I feel it’s, you know, it— or it makes a lot of sense to cut it out. Sometimes I leave it in because that’s regular human conversation. And as long as you can understand both people at the same time, just leave it in. The thing I would like AI to do is take away that first To sort of— if I could train it to do what I do so that I don’t have to do the first pass and just do the refined second edit, that would save me a lot of time. The second edit takes longer than the first, but boy, if I could knock out that first edit, that would really— would you let AI, if it was really good, do that kind of a thing?

Bob Dunn:
You know, it would depend. I’d have, you know, I’m like, you know, I don’t— I do one pass, but I do— I listen to the entire thing from beginning to end. Sometimes what’s nice is is being able to look at the text. So I can often catch things with my eye and it shows little things.

So if I happen to see, okay, maybe I’ll try this, um, I’ll listen to it and see how it works. It is more time-consuming, um, as you know. When I think of how I edit, it would be hard to say, well, if this happens, well, maybe you do this, but this is run-on, look for this run-on, but make sure this doesn’t sound like the person Suddenly just, you know, woke up or something, or, you know, they’re just weird things. So I don’t know. We’ll see.

Bud Kraus:
Well, you know, going back to what I was saying, my 2 passes, the first pass really is a text-only edit. So I don’t look at timelines. I’m just looking at the text and editing like a regular— the second pass is I’m editing in the timeline. So that’s the essential difference between the 2 edits.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, I do both at the same time.

Bud Kraus:
Yeah, I don’t know how you— I couldn’t do what you do. I mean, you know, but listen, The thing is, I’ve learned about podcasting and, you know, is that it’s in the editing. I mean, you know, you could take a crappy show and make it really good in editing. But, you know, I sort of have like an NPR style of editing. You know, I want fast. I don’t want a lot of gaps. I don’t want to, you know, that’s just it. I’ve realized that it’s, you know, my brain has been wired to NPR style. So that’s the way I edit. But it’s really interesting, isn’t it? That this is where you put your stamp on what you do. I put my stamp on what I do. And I once asked you, why don’t you let other people edit? You can’t. That’s why.

Bob Dunn:
That’s the answer. I could never explain, they would send me a question every 5 minutes. Now, what did you want me to do with this part? You brought up an interesting point there because we all have our own editing styles and our own expectations. And you know, the people that are really—I mean, you know—a lot of people are going to do podcasts, and they’re going to try to use as much automation as they can because that’s just a small part of what they do or something that they don’t—you know—have a lot of resources to put into it or time. So it’s interesting, though, to think that yeah, exactly that editors don’t follow some. You know, you don’t pull out the podcast editor handbook or something and go through all that. You learn how you feel it should sound.

Bud Kraus:
Exactly. But, you know, there are commercial editors, obviously, people that are hired to edit podcasts and stuff like that. I don’t think I could edit somebody else’s podcast. I’d have no idea what to do. See, you and I think exactly the same on this.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, um, yeah, that’s a good point. Yep.

Bud Kraus:
Well, you know, but I know you, Agree. To us, it’s what makes a show is how it’s edited at the end. I mean, the content is important, obviously, but the, the quality for the listener, that’s, you know, that’s where it’s at, is in editing.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, exactly.

Bud Kraus:
I find it to be a really interesting process. Even after all the time I’ve done it, I still love it and figure out ways to get better at it, you know? Yeah, it’s really interesting.

Bob Dunn:
So having done it this long, it’s— I’m just kind of wired into it and that’s Part of the baby.

Bud Kraus:
You know, Bob Dunn, one other thing too, speaking of AI, which we haven’t, but did you used to— somebody did, I think it was you or some— would send their audio to somebody to transcribe? You don’t have to do that anymore.

Bob Dunn:
You know, I— yeah, I was the one way back. I was paying like, God, it was Rev.com. They had an automatic one that was just, you know, how crappy it was. So I would pay $1 a minute. So if you had a 60-minute podcast, you’d pay $60. And I mean, they were really good. And I just, I spent a lot of money for like 2 years on that, thousands of dollars. And now, it’s interesting because I have 3 or 4 different tools that give me a transcript in what I use because everything gives you transcripts now, you know, no matter what. And I use, I actually use a transcript from Castmagic because I’ve found it to be the best done transcript. Of course it’s AI, you know, but it is, yeah, that definitely has gotten better over the years, especially more recently.

Bud Kraus:
Am I right to assume that you only use Claude for generative AI?

Bob Dunn:
You know, what I use Claude for is more ideas and stuff. I go in and I talk about, okay, I have this, I have a new show I’m thinking about, or I want to do this, or something about social media. It’s kind of my, you know, my second brain to that. I can shoot stuff back and forth. And it really, you know, a lot of times it’s very helpful if I— But you got to also, you know, anything they come back the first time around, you know, You got to start tearing it apart and digging into it to fit what you need. But then, you know, I’m finding it is nice that it’s learning about everything I do on my site. So when I do say something, it says, well, you do this over here. This would be a good, you know, way to follow or something. So that, that stuff is very helpful. And so I use it primarily Just for that. And the other thing is, it’s pretty expensive, this Castmagic. A lot of people— I wouldn’t recommend it to a lot of people because it’s pricey. But it’s— the thing I like is everything is in one place. And I have like 20 different prompts set up for it and for each episode. And I don’t use them all, but I use them You know, some of them I may use for specific episodes or for some other reason.

Bud Kraus:
Wow. Yeah. Is that what helps you generate the content in your emails too?

Bob Dunn:
You know, it probably would. Yeah. You can basically tell it anything. You can say, you know, give me social whatever. And the one thing I do, and a lot of people don’t necessarily think this is the best idea to do, but, you know, as somebody that has repurposed content for You know, God, years.

Bud Kraus:
You’re the master.

Bob Dunn:
Too many years, almost 2 decades it feels like. Is, you know, I have it write a blog post from each episode and I ask it to pull out something a little bit more drilled in, you know, not just another recap of the whole thing. I try to pull— and it comes out with a good one. I do very little editing to it. And, you know, maybe some people might call it slop, but it Basically, it’s just, it’s not from the ground up. It’s just pulling the content from that. So it’s repurposing it. It’s just, I’m not having to use my brain to go through a whole thing and try to figure out what to say.

Bud Kraus:
I asked ChatGPT to generate like a 5-paragraph summary of an episode. And it does a really good— it would take me hours to write that. And now I just edit it. Now, I find that unfortunately, I’m writing less and less and less because of AI. I hate that. See, I’m a writer and I’m like losing touch. And now you could say, well, hey, you don’t, you know, you don’t have to. But AI does it better and faster. And all I can do is like, I can edit, change, you know, but it even writes the way I write. So I mean, it’s runny. It’ll say like, do you want me to write this in Seriously Bud style? Yeah. Okay. What am I supposed to say? No.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. I’ve been trying, you know, every once in a while to maybe do like a commentary or something as opposed just to write it out. And I do spend time writing out a lot of stuff and then having it clean up. So people got to realize I’m always constantly changing stuff and I’m just added— I’m adding a 5th podcast. I’m going to do the very first episode. this Friday, but it evolved out of some content I was already doing. And it seemed like it made sense to do it audio versus just writing a post, because that’s where my audience is, or the majority of my audience. But yeah, I try to still write stuff out. It’s just like you said, all that stuff you got to put in show notes and You know, all the things I mentioned for the episode, I could not possibly ever have the time to do that with as much content as I’m putting out. So I guess I can use that excuse, but I was basically just regenerating all the content that was original content through the audio. So I don’t feel too bad about it.

Bud Kraus:
Yeah, I know. The audio is really, as I Have come to realize what a rich source of stuff to use. Like, I created that game that I’m still working on. Well, I don’t want to get too deep into this, but I did this for the Web Agency Summit. And hopefully we’ll do it again where you just take a little clip and you ask people to identify who’s speaking in that clip. What episode did that come from? I mean, there’s just like, you know, so my show I can turn into games and, you know, different kind of thing than you. But It’s just, like I say, you’re only limited by your imagination.

Bob Dunn:
Exactly.

Bud Kraus:
Because the technology, the tools are there, which is amazing, right?

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, for sure. So yeah, so it’s a crazy world, you know, it’s good things, crazy stuff.

Bud Kraus:
And as long as people still value human interaction, and I, in this age, all you ever see is, With AI, we still need human beings, right? After they tell you how great AI is, the last sentence is, but human interaction is still really important. We agree. And humans still want human-generated content, human interaction. We like all the tools, but we still want the human to be first. And I think in podcasting, that gives humans the opportunity to be first.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, I think it The day comes where the original content that everything comes out ends up being something else or has to be something else, then that’s the day it’s over because it’s going to always be human first. And of course, who knows what’s down the road or what’s next around the corner or something. I mean, people keep trying things like these. I don’t want to call them fake podcasts, but using AI characters and hosts and guests or whatever. You know, that is one of the things that who knows where it will wander off to and who will use it for what and stuff. But like you said, I still think a lot of people for the conversation, maybe not for learning as much in the sense of just solid straight, here’s the, here’s the stuff, but for those conversations where you’re learning things. They’re going to want to hear real people actually making it.

Bud Kraus:
Well, let me ask you this question. And this is— there’s no real answer, or it’s very hard to answer this question. Do you think all AI-generated content should be labeled AI-generated?

Bob Dunn:
You know, I would have to think about that because there’s certain content that doesn’t matter. You know, to me, it’d be— it could be very confusing because it’s almost like you need Not just to say, hey, it’s AI, but you have to put in some other disclaimer and then it gets— it just gets a mess.

Bud Kraus:
I know. What would you have to disclose as AI and what don’t you have to disclose? Now, I’ll give you some examples. Okay. So on Facebook, I’m one of those— I’ve become, unfortunately, one of these doomscrollers. I’m just fascinated by some of this junk that I see. And it’s junk. I know. It’s like eating McDonald’s every day. But, you know, when you see stuff that’s artificial, that you know is like cartoonish and stupid and funny, then I watch it. Okay. And I know I don’t have to. But the other day I was watching something, a clip of Paul McCartney talking in a way that I had never heard him talk about the people in his life.

Bob Dunn:
Really?

Bud Kraus:
And I’m listening to him and going, wow, that’s so interesting. And I— And I was listening 5, 10 minutes or so. And then I start to realize, hey, this can’t be Paul McCartney. He has never talked this way. It looks real. It’s— so I realized one thing is, am I getting fooled or is this really what he said? I didn’t like that. Human beings don’t like to get fooled by artificial intelligence. And that’s where I draw the line.

Bob Dunn:
Right.

Bud Kraus:
If you are gonna fool me, whether it’s a political spot or it’s some well-known figure talking about something that never happened or whatever. I’m drawing the line. I don’t want to be fooled again.

Bob Dunn:
You know, in the broader sense, when I thought about that, I was thinking broadly and I was even thinking your own website and stuff like that. But I agree with you like a gazillion percent if such a thing exists, that anything on social, social is just nasty mess. I think all social platforms should be required to do it because there is so much stuff being manipulated. And they’ve already screwed up society enough.

Bud Kraus:
I felt so screwed. I felt so cheated that I was wasting 10 minutes or more listening to McCartney talk about Yoko or Lennon or this or that. And it was very plausible. I mean, it was very like— and I’m thinking like, but I have never heard him talk this way. Maybe he’s just talking this way because he’s an old man.

Bob Dunn:
Getting things off his chest.

Bud Kraus:
Yeah. And then I started to realize, Paul McCartney doesn’t talk this way, okay? Ever. And then it dawned on me, wow, this is brilliant AI. Or is it? Maybe he did say it. So you’re left with that question mark. I don’t know. Now just take that whole concept and do it for political figures. Now what are you going to do?

Bob Dunn:
Oh yeah. And that’s where it gets really dangerous.

Bud Kraus:
Did this guy say it? That’s where we got a real problem. And I think we might be going in that— without guardrails, we are going in that direction, obviously. Like you say, put it on social media, you got to label everything as AI if it’s AI. You’ve got to do this.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. Well, we’ve been— this is the Bud and Bob Dunn AI Show. You know, we’re— deal with that, okay?

Bud Kraus:
We really weren’t here. Yeah, that’s right. We weren’t really here. Just a little inside secret there.

Bob Dunn:
No, it’s, yeah, it’s, yeah, there’ll be a lot more discussions and stuff. But this was fun. I enjoyed this. Just, I mean, you know.

Bud Kraus:
Me too.

Bob Dunn:
We touched on podcasting, but there’s always, I think whenever you get into any kind of an AI discussion, it’s gonna go off in different strands because it’s just, you just can’t help it. You know, there’s just so many things and sometimes you feel like you could go on forever. But We won’t do that with our listeners.

Bud Kraus:
Well, this was— I can testify that this is really us.

Bob Dunn:
This is us. Yeah, yeah. It’s really us. Computer generated. Love it or leave it, you know?

Bud Kraus:
Yeah. And Bob Dunn, thank you for having me on because I have been on many of your podcasts. It’s been a while, but I’ve been on many of your podcasts that I felt like, oh, I’m probably never going to be on another episode. I screwed something up in the past.

Bob Dunn:
No, it’s always, you know, it’s always an open door.

Bud Kraus:
Well, thanks. Thank you, Bob Dunn. And speaking of episodes, you know, you can catch the Bob Dunn Dunn episode on Seriously, Bud. Just make sure you go to seriouslybud.com.

Bob Dunn:
Oh, okay. When was that?

Bud Kraus:
Yes, you can. Oh my God, that’s like 2 years ago when I got started. You were like one of my first, not my first, but one of the first, you know, because initially I just interviewed like friends, right? And then I ran out of friends.

Bob Dunn:
So you had to make new friends.

Bud Kraus:
So now I just do strangers. I did, but I just like, Whoa, I only had a few friends and now it’s like, uh, well, this thing got out of hand. So good.

Bob Dunn:
Very good. So, okay. And again, what’s that URL?

Bud Kraus:
SeriouslyBud.com. And you can get the podcast on wherever you get your podcasts.

Bob Dunn:
Well, thanks very much, Bud. It was enjoyable and I’m sure we’ll do this again sometime.

Bud Kraus:
Thanks Bob