E54 - Podcast Show Vox Pop Interviews

00:16 - David Brown (Host)

Well, hello everybody, we're here with.

00:19 - Mike Russell (Guest)

Mike Russell.

00:21 - Izabela Russell (Guest)

And Isabella Russell.

00:23 - Mike Russell (Guest)

And what do you do? I am originally an audio producer and then a podcast producer, audio guy, and now I'm an AI guy. I think I'm real.

00:33 - Izabela Russell (Guest)

I don't know I'm business brains. I guess behind music radio creative, we are the largest professional voiceover agency. We edit podcasts and we also create amazing intros and outros and everything in between, I guess.

00:47 - David Brown (Host)

And for everybody out there. They did all of the sound engineering for the podcast for me in the beginning and the trailer that you hear at the beginning of the show and at the end of the show as well, so they're well known and friendly to the podcast.

01:00 - Kendall Breitman (Guest)

My name is Kendall Brightman and I am the community manager at Riverside FM.

01:05 - David Brown (Host)

Can you give us your name and what you do?

01:07 - Matt Cheney (Guest)

I'm Matt and I am a podcast producer. In easy, simple terms.

01:16 - Jai Williams (Guest)

So tell us your name and what you do. So my name is Jai Williams. We're a voice to sound recording studio in Soho. We're a voice-to-sound recording studio in Soho and we provide a one-stop shop for recording, editing for broadcasts, podcasts and theatre, film and radio.

01:31 - David Brown (Host)

Brilliant, so tell us your name and what you do.

01:34 - Zara Anita Paul (Guest)

I'm Zara. I'm the founder of Choppity. We do AI video editing for short videos.

01:39 - David Brown (Host)

So tell us your name and what you do.

01:41 - Fiona Fraser (Guest)

My name is Fiona Fraser. I'm director of Pow PR.

01:44 - David Brown (Host)

Can you tell us your name and what you do?

01:47 - Katie Hill (Guest)

Yeah, sure, my name is Katie. I'm a general freelancer in audio, but I'm here today because I work for the Radio Academy, which is a UK charity for the whole of the audio and radio industry.

02:00 - David Brown (Host)

Hello, can you tell us your name and?

02:01 - Francesco Corsi (Guest)

what you do. Yeah, sure, I'm Frank. I work at Spreaker. I mainly work with advertisers. I mean, I help them invest their dollars wisely into podcast advertising.

02:12 - David Brown (Host)

Can you introduce yourselves, please, and tell us what you do?

02:15 - Sangeeta Pillai (Guest)

I'm Sangeeta Pillai. I run Masala Podcast, which is the top South Asian feminist podcast. I'm also a governor of the Podcast Academy, which is why I'm here with Michelle so that's what I do, brilliant.

02:26 - Michelle Cobb (Guest)

I'm Michelle Cobb. I'm Executive Director of the Podcast Academy, which is a membership organisation, and we do the Ambies Awards.

02:33 - David Brown (Host)

Excellent, brilliant, can you guys? I'm just going around today and just asking people how they're using AI in their businesses. I don't know who wants to go first okay, I'm really excited.

02:46 - Izabela Russell (Guest)

So do you know what my favourite use of AI actually on this stand is this? So look at this. We do beautiful much with AI. So this is my journey and I absolutely love my journey. If you go to our website, actually every single image in there is from Midjourney and people always comment and say, oh my gosh, who designed it? And I'm like me. Surely it counts if I'm the prompt engineer behind it. So, yeah, I love it. So Midjourney for me is a must. I use it all the time and I'm very proud to say I don't use Chad GPT for prompt engineering, I do it myself.

03:26 - Mike Russell (Guest)

There you go, there you go and for me, I'm using AI in a multitude of ways. I love voice cloning, so I've cloned my voice with 11 labs. I'm also thinking that I'd like to make a synthetic avatar of myself. I actually teach it on my channel creator magic. I delve into the tools that content creators can use and it's just a really exciting space. Just like Isabella, I use Midjourney for thumbnail design, so I'll make something in Midjourney, then I'll do a face swap and put my face on the thumbnail, and then I use a bit of Adobe Express to do the text and things like that. So just any tool, and I love things that are new and shiny, so I'm always looking for the next exciting AI tool.

04:03 - David Brown (Host)

Brilliant and Kendall, do you use AI regularly?

04:08 - Kendall Breitman (Guest)

Yes, I do. Oh, yes, I do Almost daily. Yeah, go on, yeah. So because I'm using Riverside, we have a ton of AI tools built into it, so I'm using AI almost daily, whether it's recording transcripts, show notes, everything like that, and what do you find?

04:29 - David Brown (Host)

what do you like the most about it?

04:31 - Kendall Breitman (Guest)

I like the most about AI is that you're able to do a lot more in less time, so you're able to really like streamline what you're doing and also kind of offload what you don't want to do.

04:42 - David Brown (Host)

Right.

04:42 - Kendall Breitman (Guest)

Yeah, yeah. So that's what I love about AI.

04:44 - David Brown (Host)

And what do you not like about it?

04:46 - Kendall Breitman (Guest)

I think what I, the thing that I don't like about AI is that I think that sometimes it's missing a human factor in the way that if I ask it to make something like a social post, it'll say something like level up your social post with you know, and it kind of can be a little bit robotic. I know you can train them to speak more in your voice, but I think that that takes a little bit of time in the like time in the beginning to really pay off later. You know you have to train it. Yeah, that can take time, that's true, yeah, and so when you're trying to streamline something, when you love ai because it streamlines your time, the idea of training it can feel counterintuitive yeah, yeah, no, that's fair enough.

05:22 - David Brown (Host)

Excellent, and do you use ai at all in your workflow?

05:25 - Matt Cheney (Guest)

yeah, every day, everything, every step of the way, I'm using ai. I'm using ai to help devise scripts, work out um lines of questioning. I use ai to do research. I use tools like perplexity to allow me to get real-time information um Recording not using AI, although you could say that using some of the teleprompter functionality that has AI in it. And then post-production, I'm using audio restoration tools all the time. I'm using editing, supporting tools like Autopod that help me change camera angles. It uses workflows to help create social content as well, and in here, show notes and aggregating data after it. Yeah, all of it.

06:10 - David Brown (Host)

All of it. Like me, I use all of it. Everything I can use, yeah, and do you use AI in that workflow at all?

06:16 - Jai Williams (Guest)

Not at the moment. Well, we receive AI when we're doing documentaries, when they do the placeholders, where the narration is going to go. Some of that's ai and then it gets replaced. Okay for us. I mean, ai. Voicing is is, as you well know, is a very um contested area at the moment. Yeah, uh, we've had to turn some work away because I think that we will lose voice artists. They won't work with us if we, but otherwise, I think some tools audio cleaning, audio prepping, uh, some of the ai tools that are going to come in for sound engineers are going to be fantastic to allow us to our workflow to be faster, and some of those tools I will use for sure.

06:55 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's going to help a lot of people who maybe don't have the skill yeah it's somebody just said in the last interview going from zero to one and it's going to help the new people. But I think there's then getting one to ten is a whole different thing, where we still want the human touch.

07:11 - Jai Williams (Guest)

Absolutely, I agree. I think AI is going to help anyone. The problem is is how they use the AI. There's always a fear of someone that doesn't know what they're doing. Using AI. If you don't have the underground skills of editing and what you're creating, you still need the creative input from the professionals. But it doesn't mean to say that you can't do it yourself. Of course you can and I think it's a great tool. It will be a great tool, so it makes them, I would say, a bit more engaging content. I do believe that it will help people to make better content. It will, for sure.

07:43 - David Brown (Host)

So since you're doing AI editing, I assume you're using AI every day.

07:47 - Zara Anita Paul (Guest)

Using AI every day More than I would like to be and how are you finding it, is it?

07:57 - David Brown (Host)

That's not what I want to ask. How are you using it? How do you use it in your work?

08:03 - Zara Anita Paul (Guest)

I don't actually use it directly in my work. I use it in my product, but not directly in my work, that's not even true. I use a lot of ChatGPT so that I don't have to start from blank canvases. I find it really helpful also for reformulating how I've written things. I can speak in a really casual way which can come across quite unprofessional in a lot of contexts.

08:26 - David Brown (Host)

So I get I get chat GPT to just tidy it up and make things seem a little bit less, um yeah, familiar okay, that's a good use of it, and we were just talking a second ago and you said you had some pretty strong views on AI, so the microphone is yours, it's. Yeah, I said you had some pretty strong views on AI, so the microphone is yours.

08:42 - Fiona Fraser (Guest)

Yeah, I've actually had some conversations today, quite a lot of conversations around AI, especially the podcast show in London where we're at now. There are a lot of companies using AI to help podcasters create content. I work directly with an amazing content creation agency and I know the difference between something that's been just created with AI and not. The way I see AI is. It's a tool to assist, it's not the end result. So for me my job is in PR it's all about relationships. You physically cannot build relationships with AI.

09:19

So any of the services I see that are like outreach into this person, that person it's, it's spam. You don't. You see the email. You know it's ai. You delete the email. My email list is the lifeblood of my company and I treat all of my emails that I send out with respect or I wouldn't be here now. So I kind of think like, just be careful, be conscious. Definitely use to assist, like and I'm getting more and more into a lot. I've got AI in all sorts of things, like around project management, right, perfect. But when it comes to contacting people, when it comes to attracting people, just be aware of that like difference around it. Does it look fake or not, because people do actually know the difference now yeah, and it's.

10:05 - David Brown (Host)

It's good for workflow automation and those sorts of things right now.

10:07 - Fiona Fraser (Guest)

But yeah, the personal contact is not the best we know the difference as humans, the amount of signals we pick up. Now I have part psychology degree so I don't know all the ins and outs, but the signals we pick up from people is around their body language, the way they speak, the tone of their voice, just everything. We know instantly if something isn't right and that is the thing with the content and all the big platforms they're starting to penalize people. They recognize this content and they're penalizing it. So, to be honest, as I've been told, stay by an expert. In their opinion, if you start to post content from AI, it just won't go anywhere. You'll get no traction at all and you might even start to be penalized as an account. That's the word on the street. I don't know if that's true, but I just know that I would never use it to assist me to contact people, build relationships. I'll just use it to help free up my time as much as possible so I can spend more time building relationships.

11:03 - David Brown (Host)

Brilliant, and do you use AI in your day-to-day job?

11:08 - Katie Hill (Guest)

I don't think so. When I was just thinking about this, nothing sticks out to me, but I am aware and I have used software in the past that is powered by AI, like Descript, for example. I've used to edit podcasts and stuff. It's not my go-to software, but I'm definitely aware of it.

11:26 - David Brown (Host)

Okay, and like NodeChat, gpt or anything like that, to sort of help with outlining or anything.

11:32 - Katie Hill (Guest)

I don't use it in my work. I've used ChatGPT in my personal life just like, especially when it was first coming out. It was like fun to play around with. But yeah, I don't really use it in work and what do you think?

11:47 - David Brown (Host)

I mean, I know this is the radio academy, so what is there? What do you think? The academy? So I know you can't speak on behalf of the academy, that's not really what I'm asking, but, um, what's your impression of what people think about ai?

11:59 - Katie Hill (Guest)

I think people think it's very scary and we're kind of on the precipice of something Like we don't know where everything's going to go. At our Radio Academy Festival last year we had a big speech from a great speaker I can't remember his name right now you can cut that bit out who was talking about what ai can be and like what we can use it for in radio, and I think everyone was really excited about what he was saying because it's just like all new and shiny um. But I can see how everyone can also find it scary and like is it gonna take our jobs? Is it gonna I don't know like diminish our skill set or like we don't need certain people, certain things anymore? Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's like a lot of mixed feelings about it at the minute right.

12:49 - David Brown (Host)

I think it's going to take some people's jobs and some parts of work and it hopefully will free us up to do some of the more interesting stuff that humans can do, specifically because we're so creative and we're human yeah, definitely.

13:02 - Katie Hill (Guest)

I was just talking to my colleague about this earlier. Like, um, it makes sense to use ai in some like to free us up for some other like more mundane tasks. Like that no one enjoys um, so I kind of I get people using it for that, but I I have issues when it comes to kind of using it for creative things. I was talking to somebody earlier who was like oh, we can bash out an advert, like we can produce a whole advert in one minute, and it's like, oh, that's great, but like it means that people aren't getting voiceover work, or like advert producers aren't getting that kind of work. So it's difficult in an industry that is like we rely so much on freelancers to prop up the industry and when work dries up for those freelancers, I just wonder how things are going to go.

13:51 - David Brown (Host)

Yeah, me too, and do you use AI in your day-to-day job or in your life?

13:57 - Francesco Corsi (Guest)

Well, not much really. I just started using a little bit chat gpt just to write emails for me because I'm a bit lazy as a guy.

14:07 - David Brown (Host)

That's it and uh, and how do you find it? Is it actually really helpful, or do you find that you have to just end up doing stuff yourself anyway?

14:15 - Francesco Corsi (Guest)

definitely helpful. I mean, I had the panel at the podcast show yesterday about programmatic and honestly I asked Chachi PT, can you write what should I say at the panel for me? And I just repeated exactly what.

14:29 - David Brown (Host)

Chachi PT said Excellent, and so do you use. You've got two different perspectives here, which is amazing. So how do you use, or do you use, ai in your workflow?

14:42 - Sangeeta Pillai (Guest)

amazing. So how do you use, or do you use, ai in your workflow and how's? How does that work for you? So I so I tried using ai the basic of chat, gpd, um but I didn't really like it. So I'm a writer, fundamentally, I identify as a writer, and I got sick of the 10th time it said deep dive into something and I'm like that is not what I sound like and I take a lot of pride in what I write. So, whether it's social media, whether it's a newsletter, whether it's podcast notes, whatever you know. So it didn't really measure up and I tried doing the training your AI thing. That didn't work for me either.

15:12

The problem, I think, with AI is it's very Western focused. So my podcast is a South Asian podcast, right, and we use, we speak in English, but there's a thing called Hinglish, which is like between in Hindi and English and we might say a certain thing, a certain way. It's very difficult to train AI which comes from the West to try, and you know, do that. I'm hoping that there's some sort of Indian company that comes up with something.

15:36

The other interaction I had with AI was there was a translation software that used AI to translate and last year I was sitting in a panel exactly here at the podcast show and someone said, oh, we've translated Spanish and Hindi and whatever, and they played it. At the end of that they're like, oh, what did you think? And I put my hand up and I said that Hindi is like Shakespeare in English, like nobody speaks like that anymore, right, because your source is whatever you've got. It is very old, decades old, but I think what's good, though. I've just had a conversation with somebody else. I forget their what wonder something, and they do translations, and I heard the Hindi one and that's a lot better. It's a lot more spoken. You know, how you speak is very different, right, and it's using language that's of now rather than 60 years old, you know.

16:29 - David Brown (Host)

It's kind of like Pi, because I don't know if you've used Pi, the AI tool. No, but the difference between Pi and, say, like a chat GPT, is that Pi was trained using audio and video. Yeah, so it's the way it speaks is more like a human would speak instead of being trained on academic text yeah, oh, that's so interesting.

16:50 - Sangeeta Pillai (Guest)

I didn't know that, so it depends on the set that you used to?

16:53 - David Brown (Host)

yeah, so maybe that handy tool was used on training, yeah, like recordings, yes, sort of thing that had been transcribed. Yeah, you get the video and the audio.

17:02 - Sangeeta Pillai (Guest)

Yeah, and you get the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, wondercraft, I just remembered what the name of that okay great that was a lot better yeah, that was a lot. I heard it and I was expecting it to be like oh my god, here we go again, but actually it was really really good, so that was good so I've used ai in a couple of different ways.

17:20 - Michelle Cobb (Guest)

e what happened in the War of: 1812

17:59 - David Brown (Host)

Brilliant. Just one more question just quickly where do you think we're going to be in the next five years with ai and how it's going to impact the creative industries?

18:14 - Izabela Russell (Guest)

do you know what it? It actually scares me a little bit because just think of how far we've gone over the past two years alone. Five years seems like the whole decade in terms well, actually two, three decades in terms of how fast ai is going. So, um, I just my hope is that creativity will prevail, in the sense that, uh, we, we will still value the, the real human creations, uh, as much as we still, we still do, and I, I hope that ai will just aid us, maybe make us a little bit faster at things, but won't replace us entirely.

18:49 - Mike Russell (Guest)

So yeah, I echo those thoughts. Really, I think that AI is going to get better and better on an almost exponential curve, so we're going to see so much change and we will question our existence, essentially, I believe. But what I hope we find as creators is meaning in what we do. As long as we can find something we're passionate about and talk about it and use AI to enhance our skills in ways we couldn't imagine, I think that's great. So if, for instance, I'm a bad graphic designer, now, with MidJourney and guidance from AI, I can get better at that, and that is the cool thing about AI. I hope it stays that way. I don't know, though.

19:27 - David Brown (Host)

Brilliant, Thanks guys.

19:28 - Mike Russell (Guest)

Thank you so much, thank you.

19:30 - David Brown (Host)

And where do you think we're going to be with AI in the next five years or so?

19:35 - Kendall Breitman (Guest)

I think that AI is going to be incorporated in a lot more things that people won't know. So something that I notice here is that people will say I don't know. I don't know much about AI, I don't want to get into it very much, but I'd love to be able to get a transcript when I'm done recording and they don't realize that that's AI. Or I'd love to be able to have show notes written for me. That's AI. So I think that it's just going to be continuing to incorporate itself into things that you may or may not even notice that it's being incorporated into.

20:01

So, we'll see it more and more Brilliant.

20:04 - David Brown (Host)

Thanks, Hannah. Yeah, of course. And just one last quick question when?

20:11 - Matt Cheney (Guest)

do you think we're going to be in, say, five years? Where are we going to be in five years? The tide is going to rise all ships when it comes to content creation. Ai is going to allow people to go from zero to one with minimal friction, like zero friction. There's going to be no excuse. The advent of B-roll technology and video generated by AI is again. It's going to allow people to start that storytelling process really, really quickly. So I think in five years time it will be synonymous with the ideation process. It'll be synonymous with the production process. It will just become part of our tool.

20:48

I liken it to spell checking like Grammarly. It's just integrated. People don't really worry. You know computer or your phone tells you you've spelled that wrong and you don't go. Ah, damn it, I want to do it myself right the first time every time. It's just going to be so integrated. There's going to be some people to push back, but I think in terms of starting content and creating ideas, it will just help everyone get from one to zero. Brilliant. Thanks, matt, thank you.

21:12 - David Brown (Host)

And so where do you think we're going to be in the next, say, five years?

21:16 - Jai Williams (Guest)

I don't think we're going to be as far forward as we think we are. I think, in the same way, that we're all worried about computers from the analog era. I'm showing my age here, but I remember in the old days that we were like oh, computers are going to change everything. They have sped things up, they made things better. You know editing audio. You don't have to splice it with a razor blade anymore. That's right, but it hasn't removed the work it still has to be done by a computer. It just means that sound engineers are now more computer based than they are tape based, and I think AI is going to be the same. I think it's going to be a good tool. I think it will replace some areas. I mean, we've already started to see e-learning. You're starting to see that they're not using voice artists anymore. So it will change that area. We'll see the sands change a bit, but it's definitely not going to decimate it in the way I think everyone is fearing.

22:11 - David Brown (Host)

I genuinely don't know Like it.

22:12 - Zara Anita Paul (Guest)

Thank you very much. You're more than welcome. And where do you think we're going to be in five years? I mean, I don't even know where we're going to be in six months, let alone in five years. Someone came by just before and said that currently in production globally, we're using about 1% of the tech that we have researched. In the next five years is when the next 99% is going to come out. If you think about how much things have changed in the last year, year and a half, I feel like five years is going to be crazy Brilliant.

22:37 - David Brown (Host)

Thank you, of course. Thank you, and where do you think we're going to be in the next five years?

22:43 - Fiona Fraser (Guest)

I mean next five years? I can't even imagine, because I feel that the last year has just been already like so much has happened. But what I do know, I feel, is that the more personal we can be, the better. That's going to actually be your superpower. So use AI to free yourself up to just be in person and have impersonal conversations, build relationships, because I know everyone says about AI taking jobs, but for me, it just means I can actually do more of the work that I like doing and I'm good at and people actually care about a month from me.

23:18 - David Brown (Host)

Brilliant Thanks, Fiona.

23:20 - Fiona Fraser (Guest)

You're welcome.

23:21 - David Brown (Host)

And last question where do you think we're going to be in, say, five years?

23:25 - Katie Hill (Guest)

I think things will have leveled out. I think we're now in a period where it's kind of the wild west like everyone's like, oh, let's use it for this or let's try it out for this. And I think in five years, hopefully, hopefully, we will have kind of worked out when is like an appropriate and a good time to use ai in our work and when it's like, oh no, we should go with the human option, like for this thing. And I think we will work it out as we go along, just like anything.

23:54 - David Brown (Host)

Brilliant Thanks, Katie.

23:55 - Katie Hill (Guest)

No worries, thank you.

23:57 - David Brown (Host)

And so where do you think maybe we're going to be with AI in the next five years?

24:02 - Francesco Corsi (Guest)

I don't know. I just hope I won't lose my job, probably.

24:07 - David Brown (Host)

That's fair. Me too, all right, thank you very much. Thank you, bye-bye. And so where do you think we're going to be in the next five years, based on what we've seen? I mean, it's only been a year and it's been crazy. So any ideas where you think?

24:23 - Sangeeta Pillai (Guest)

that might take us in the future. So I think it's very important, I think, as we develop AI, to think about it rather than just go right. Ai, everything's AI. It's amazing. It's amazing Because I just did a newsletter two weeks ago about the world's first ever AI beauty competition. I don't know if you saw that, so it's already taking.

24:42

You know, women struggle Like this is what I talk about a lot feminism, right. Every day we're told our bodies are not thin enough, not this enough, not that enough, right. And then you create an ai, basically a fake body, and now you're telling us to measure up to that, like that's really not cool. And so there's that kind of stuff, and the models that are being used in a lot of advertising campaigns are ai and it's unrealistic. So you're already adding.

25:07

You know, I think 80% of kids under 12 think their bodies are not good enough. I mean, isn't that crazy? It is crazy. So imagine if we bring this into the world without really thinking about it. So I think what I'm saying is I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just saying whatever we develop I don't know what that is, I'm not an AI expert we need to think about it and use it to help us what Michelle's saying scheduling, maybe translation, stuff we don't really want to do rather than say all human beings are now going to be replaced by AI, you know, which is just rubbish, I think. Have you seen the Dove album? Yes, I thought it was beautiful and I talked about it and I thought it was wonderful. That's a good job.

25:48 - David Brown (Host)

That's what we Decade.

25:50 - Sangeeta Pillai (Guest)

Yeah, absolutely Sort of campaign. Yeah absolutely, absolutely, and they did a whole thing on AI. I think you saw that. Yeah, yeah, that was really good, yeah, so that's where I think I hope it goes. Yeah, thank you.

26:02 - Michelle Cobb (Guest)

I'm seeing AI come into the voice space for audio books and podcasts, of course and unfortunately, what I'm starting to see is the negative side how it can be used to recreate someone's voice and steal the voice also, but also be used in a nefarious manner, because you can now create what sounds like a phone call from you to get money, to talk you into doing something, to make a business transaction for you that was not asked for by you. That's right. So I do think it's a great tool and I think that there are some positive uses for it, especially around accessibility. But I'm really nervous that we don't have good guidelines and the way I'm seeing it used more and more often is in a way that is potentially harmful. So I'm nervous, I guess I would say.

27:01 - Sangeeta Pillai (Guest)

Exactly, but I am nervous as well. I just feel like we've just and we do this as human beings anything new comes up, right, we're doing this now. Everything old is gone and this is what we're doing. I just think we need to be thoughtful, we need to use it to help us, but not let it become our reality. You know whether that's? You know imitating people's voices and scamming people, or making women feel bad about themselves. That's not cool.

27:28 - David Brown (Host)

I agree. Thank you very much for your time.