How AI is Transforming Podcasting

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Welcome to The Circle Sessions, featuring the Circle of Experts. The Circle of Experts are Yasmin Robles from Robles Designs, Tonnisha English Omamu of TJE Communications, and Don The Idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle270Media Podcast Consultants. Each week, one of the Circle of Experts joins me to talk about critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media, monetization, and website design, all in the mindset of implementing these to make your podcast even better. This week, Don is here with the Circle of Experts. He possesses creative powers beyond those of mere mortals. Don The Idea Guy rescues those in need of innovative ideas through his brainstorming sessions at 5 Buck Brainstorms. Don, welcome back.

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Brett, how's it going? Good. It's been a minute.

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It's been a minute and a minute and a half, possibly. It just goes so fast when you're on chat, GTP all the time.

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But.

[: 00:00:54

I think that's a good topic to bring up, even though I know the whole world is talking about this. I've renamed 2023 as the year of AI, even though it's been around, but just everybody's scared of it, or they love it, or they hate it, or they just don't know what to do with it. But I thought this would be a good session to talk about with you being the creative mind of our group, what you're using ChatGTP for, what are you feeling, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful of this great software, honestly, for us. I think it's great overall. It just comes down to how you use it.

[: 00:01:31

Yeah, I firmly fall into the camp of I think this offers all kinds of potential. I started my professional career right as desktop publishing was coming into play. I went to school for graphic design originally. My last year in art school, they were just introducing the desktop computer. When I took my first job as a graphic designer, it was a print shop that just bought their first desktop publishing setup. You basically had to learn all over again. You weren't doing the things the way I was taught. The traditional method, you use this new digital method. And over the years, that's evolved to 10 levels deeper. And it's always made the job easier. It was amazing. I lived through the advent of Photoshop. I grew up, we took photography classes with a traditional camera and you had to learn f stops and amplitudes and focal points. None of that stuff is important now. You snap a picture with your camera and you open it up in Photoshop, or you just do it in the photo editing tools on your phone and you post it there. Technology makes things so much easier to produce. We don't have fewer photographers now that when Photoshop came out, you had more photographers.

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You have fewer graphic designers when desktop opportunity came out. You had more graphic designers. So the people that look at chatGBT and go, Oh, it's going to put writers out of business. No, it's not. You're going to have more writers. You're going to have more bad writers, but you're also going to have more great writers, too. So I just.

[: 00:03:07

Think it offers potential. Yeah, the same thing happened with podcasting. When the pricing of microphones and hosting platforms got cheaper and cheaper, okay, or free, you had a bunch of bad.

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Podcasts out there. Sure, and still do.

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And still do. But that doesn't mean the whole genre, the whole platform is bad. It just comes down to the better ones are even better.

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How this episode is going to turn out still remains to be seen.

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Right. Yeah, exactly. To start this off, I asked you before we recorded a couple of days ago, if you'd been on B ard and you said you hadn't, I did a little experiment before we got on. I typed in the same thing, what are the benefits of adopting an older dog? And I typed that in the chat. Gtp typed it into B ard. Basically the same answer, both perfect, fine. And then I went with a timing thing, though. I asked it what apologies were made, both platforms, what apologies were made yesterday in public, in the press. I'm wording improperly, but I just wanted for a timing thing. And of course, chat, GTP says, I don't have anything before 2021, sorry. Or B ard does give you some recent stuff. So that is one thing to keep in mind when you're using this technology, this software.

[: 00:04:31

And that's going to change. And the different tools that come out are going to vary as well. I have not experimented with B ard yet. They had the waitlist when I first signed up. A couple of weeks back, I got the... You now have access, but I didn't bother to go check it out. I've been pretty happy with honing my skills on chat. It's basically become my favorite brainstorm partner. They're available all the time. It doesn't matter when I want to brainstorm. It's available. I can bounce around any ideas with it. I don't really use it for anything that's time sensitive. Your experiment was pretty creative to say, what apologies were issued in the press yesterday? It can't do that now. But for the things I'm asking for where I'm just asking you to build on a concept or give me some related concepts, I used to give me metaphors. Give me some metaphor ideas I can use for writer's block. It does a great job of just bouncing around ideas with me, and I've been happy with the results.

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It's good. You've got a list of what you do use ChatGTP for. Let's go over some ideas of how you're utilizing this.

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Yeah, as we do on this, I brainstorm, so I make lists for my brainstorm ideas. S ome of these I've used ideas for. Other ones are just ideas I had for using ChatGPT in podcasting that I thought your listeners might at least find interesting to explore on their own. It's also important to note I use the free version of Chat GPT. I'm sure there are some limitations there. I've certainly run across it during prime business hours that they'll have overload issues, too many people on the system, and I have to wait and come back later. But I'm not using their paid plan. They have a paid plan that would give you more access. I don't see the value in a $20 a month fee. If it was 10 bucks a month, I'd probably buy into it right away. But at 20, it's not doing my work for me. It's just adding another perspective on some stuff. So it's not an irreplaceable piece. So keep that in mind. If you're ever relying on a technology to do your entire job, then yeah, you're probably relying on it too much. But here are a few ideas to bounce around if you're a podcaster for using Chat GPT.

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The first one is to come up with topic ideas. So if you're stunned, you could say, Hey, ChatGPT, my podcast is about growing your business. Give me some topic ideas to talk about in future shows. And it'll rattle them off. You could say, Give me 100 ideas, and it'll keep clicking out 100. You say, Give me five ideas, and you can sift through them and go, Yeah, I like number five. Now, build on that concept. I like how you're talking about dealing with legal issues of your business. Give me five more topics on legal issues that I could cover as individual episodes, and it'll churn them out for you. It's a great little brainstorm partner. Guest ideas. You can say, I want to do an interview on legal issues that businesses face. What are some great guests that I could have on the show? And it'll rattle off some stuff. Now, some important things to remember is you said what's the cut off year?

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2020? 21, I think I mentioned when I did that. 21?

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So if one of the people that it's suggesting died in 2021, it may still put that name on your list, and it may suggest some people that you don't have access to, but it can still give you some guest ideas that might help you build onto something else. And then once you have a guest, you can use Chat Upto come up with the questions that you're going to ask that guest. Hey, I'm going to have Brett on my podcast. Brett is a podcast consultant that helps businesses start and grow their podcast. What are some good questions to ask Brett in my interview? And it'll come up with dozens of ideas for you to ask. That's how you generated all your questions for me today, right?

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Exactly.

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And we don't wing this at all.

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You guys can't see this, but it's just a big computer generated head of bread. I'm not even talking to him. It's a.

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Computer guy. Exactly. We mail it in from Hawaii.

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Exactly. You could have a show episode where chat GPT interviews you. You could give it a brief bio on you and say, generate some interview questions that I could ask myself in an upcoming episode. That could be fun to do. We've been talking about the text generation tools, but there's all the imagery tools, too, like Dolly2 and those things. An author and consultant that I follow a lot named Chris Brogan, he writes pretty consistently, virtually daily on LinkedIn. He's been using the AI Art tools to generate the art, the illustration that accompany his article. So you could use those AI tools, the art versions, to generate the graphics for your episodes. And you can use them. They're copyright free, basically.

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What's the best way to approach that, though? More adjectives, more descriptors in what you want it to create, or how does that work for you best?

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So I found that what they're calling the prompts. We've got a new... Prompt isn't a new prompt, isn't a new word, but it's new to the lexicon of AI iterative tools. The better you get at the prompts you put into the machine, the better prices are going to come out of it. We've always said with our background in sales, ask better questions, get better answers. That's basically what it is. Give better prompts, get better output, and use it as an iterative process. When I'm brainstorming with it, like I said with the show topic ideas that I gave you, if you say, Give me 10 results on this thing, and it gives you 10 results and nine of them suck, look at the one that was good and go, Okay, well, I like this concept. Give me more about that, and it'll build more on it. So it learns from itself a bit. You can also give it blocks of copy. One of the ideas I had on here was to use ChatGBT to generate summaries of your podcast transcripts. So take your interviews, feed them into ChatGBT, and have it kick out a summary of the show that you can use in your show description whenever you post it.

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You could tell it to give you ideas for social media posts to promote your episode. And if you don't like it, tell it to tweak it. Say, I want it like that, but I want it to be funnier. Those are also great things to say. You can say, Give me a serious response, or use humor, explain this concept to me like I'm a five year old. Explain it to me like I'm hearing it for the first time. One of the things I think is fun is you can tell it to right in the voice of another person. So I would say, Give me a summary to this podcast episode as if Mark Twain wrote it, and it'll give you this folksy, funny reply. Is it a perfect Mark Twain response? No, not at all. But it's still fun that you can get it to write it with personality. Write a summary of this podcast as if it were a Seinfeld episode, and it'll generate a response for you.

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Amazing. T hat goes the same way with the images you're trying to create.

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Sure. A lot of the AI sites will give you a category like make it photo realistic, or make it like an oil painting, or make it a cartoon, make it look like animation. You start out with picking a category, but you can even say if there's an artist that you like, a fantasy artist is Frank Frazetta, make it... Create a piece of artwork for this podcast episode on defeating problems in business and make it look like a Frank Frazzetta Conan oil painting. It'll do its best to generate a response based on that description. Now, I have found and others have found that the results you get from AI art are interesting in that it can't produce text. So if it tries any lettering, it just looks like gobbledygook. They're not real words. And it can't draw hands. It just can't draw hands. Even cartoon hands. Mickey Mouse with the three fingers and the thumb, you still can't get it. There'll be like six fingers on one hand, and then there'll be four thumbs on the other hand. It just can't draw hands.

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That's interesting. Who has the rights to five fingered hands?

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It's really weird. I don't know why it does it, but you can get some pretty good images. Some of them will take input. You can upload a photo and say... Chris Brogan does this a lot. A lot of the figures, a lot of the characters in his article illustrations are based on his likeness, so it'll use a character like a caricature of him. Okay. Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting. But if you want to look at skyline, you want a skyline with a giant coffee cup as a building, it could generate something like that.

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All right. I guess the caveat that in my mind I'm thinking too is that to be consistent with who you are as a podcaster, though, in regards to the description that you're asking and the artwork and such, because you could go crazy. But if your listeners are expecting one thing from you, if you're serious business entrepreneur thing, but you're throwing these weird images, or like you said, Mark Twain, writing your description, does that hit the mark? Think about what you're creating as well. It can be fun to be creative. But to your point, I.

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Think it's fantastic. As we like to say, your mileage may vary.

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But be careful of what you're creating for yourself. It's fun. It is fun. I think it's so creative. But also think about, okay, the end user of your podcast, of your blog or whatever is expecting this. So be careful what you do. Right.

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But let's say you're doing a true crime podcast, it'd be really cool to like, oh, give me a serial killer, wearing a ski mask and holding a butcher's knife. It could generate original art for you that way. Or Give me a Sherlock Holmes type character.

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Yeah, exactly. Your fans would love it.

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Or if your podcast is all about Seinfeld, it'd be really cool to have all of your show descriptions written in the style of a Seinfeld episode.

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Exactly. Well, and talk about it. It fits perfectly with what you're doing. Brainstorming creativity that this tool is a third arm for you. Anything you create from it is perfect for it. Yeah.

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It's interesting. It's a nd it's more fun than it's novel. It's something new to try. It's fun to experiment with. Is it going to replace what I'm doing? No. I'm doing the daily posts at bigyellowsticky. Com where every day I draw a new original quote on a sticky note and publish it. Well, the content on the sticky note is 100 % me. It's an idea that was sparked in my brain, but I'm writing an article that goes along with it. So frequently I'll take my prompt from the sticky note, paste it into chat tpt and go, Give me two paragraphs on this concept, and it'll churn out something weak. Maybe there's one clever line in it, or maybe there's something in there that makes me think of a clever line, but it's been a good writing partner. It's not going to replace me. I don't think it's going to replace anybody except the worst writers, perhaps. But it's interesting. If I feel like something has gone on too long, like this reply, perhaps, I could paste this into chat, GPT and go make this shorter, make this more succinct, and it'll do that. It can be a good editor.

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Well, in a previous episode I recorded with Yasmin, she term this as an AI intern. That's a really good way of putting it.

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That's a brilliant way of putting it. And I wish I had thought of it. It's an intern. It's absolutely an intern. It is not a full time hire. It's not an expert that you brought in. They've already proven that a lot of the facts these AI things generate are not true because it goes out to the internet, find stuff, brings it back. Well, a lot of the stuff they're finding out on a crappy web page are wrong. There's a lawsuit going on right now in Australia, I don't know if you've heard about this, a politician, chat GPT did some summary of this political figure, and it said that he was convicted of fraud and spent time in jail. Well, that's not the case. What really happened was he was the whistleblower for this company. He's the one that brought it to the attention of the courts and had it taken care of. But it basically libeled him, the AI. So check, I wouldn't even say trust, but verify. Verify anything that you're going to assert that this thing figured out because it may have pulled it from a joke site, one of the fake news sites that churns out bad articles. Yeah, absolutely verify any factual things that you think you're going to put your name on because it's been proven to generate false information.

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Yeah.

[: 00:18:09

Well, what I'm getting from you is this could actually eliminate the term writer's block.

[: 00:18:14

Oh, yeah. Well, I think writer's block is made up anyway. Okay. You never run into that. Writer's block is an excuse. It's an excuse. I got you. When you're talking to somebody, do you have talker's block?

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Sometimes. I'm tongue tied. I'm tongue tied.

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That's different. That's having too much to say. I think writer's block is made up. But yes, if you're having trouble deciding between two ideas, chatGBT, which of these two ideas do you think is stronger? The fun part about that is, if it picks the one that you don't like, you instantly know that you like the other idea better. It's like that flip a coin, heads or tails. Which do you wish it would... Oh, I wish it was heads? All right, well, then just do the heads one. Don't rely on the result. But it's a partner. It's a brainstorming partner. But intern, that's really good. It's a bad intern. It's a hard working but dumb intern.

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Dumb intern, exactly. They can't even bring you a cup of coffee. Just that. Right, exactly. I'm sure there's a podcast being made now about just every episode, something they churn out on chat. That's all of it.

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I like intern GPT. I think that would be awesome. I.

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Think so. Yeah, the intern GPT. Exactly. Just make it a whole podcast.

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Because I will absolutely... You're right. I have to check its work like it's an intern. Yeah. Yes, correct. Who was that? Yasmin?

[: 00:19:40

It's Tenisha. Tenisha product.

[: 00:19:42

That was good.

[: 00:19:42

Tenisha. Nice job.

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Well, I.

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Think it's a respect of the software. Put it in its place. That's what it is. It's a tool.

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It's a hammer. It's a wrench. It's Photoshop. Photoshop does not go out and take the photos for you. It lets you tweak the photos and give them more personality. And there are things in Photoshop that... You've got auto exposure. You've got that on your camera, auto exposure. You can adjust the tint and the colorization. That's chat GPT. You can adjust the tone. You can use it to edit. I have a bad thing when I write. I switch back and forth in first person to second person perspective a lot. So you could tell chat chitchat, you'll look at this text, fix my first person perspective, that thing.

[: 00:20:31

Correct.

[: 00:20:32

My grammar.

[: 00:20:33

Correct your grammar. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, hopefully this has got you, listener, thinking about chat TTP. If you've got any thoughts or some things you've come up with, how can they get a hold of you, Don? Just talk a little bit more.

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Oh, look for me on social media. I'm on the Facebooks and the Twitters and the LinkedIns as @DontheIdeaGuy. You can also find me at dontheideaguy.com.

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And catch me at mypodcastguy.com. And thanks for following and subscribing to the Circle sessions from Circle270 Media podcast consultants.