AI for Content Creators: Embracing the Tool That's Here to Stay

Welcome to another edition of the Independent Creator Podcast. Tonight, we're diving into some topics that some might deem dark and mysterious. That's right, we're talking about AI.

I know, I know. AI has pretty much been the topic of conversation everywhere you turn. You can't avoid hearing about it on websites, podcasts, and discussions across the internet. That's exactly why I'm bringing AI to you guys as well.

So tonight, let's dig into why AI might be important for your workflow procedures. More importantly, let's talk about why you shouldn't be afraid of it because AI is not going to take your jobs. When used correctly, it can help you cut your podcast editing or video editing process in half. What usually takes you an hour could become 30 minutes or even 20 minutes because AI can handle a lot of the repetitive stuff that would normally bog you down.

The Video Editing Revolution

There are plenty of tools out there that help with video editing, and most of them use what's called text-based editing. Let me explain what I mean by that using Descript as an example.

Descript is a powerful tool where you can record directly into the platform or upload your existing video podcast. What it does is analyze your file and automatically remove silent parts, ums, and filler words. Then you can edit your video like you're editing a Word document. It's actually pretty cool, and I've used it in the past. While it takes some thought in how to approach it, it definitely speeds up your workflow.

Here's how it works: you have your video player with a timeline at the bottom and a transcript of your video on the left side. You can delete entire sections, and Descript will perform what we call in the business a "ripple delete." It removes the deleted portion and moves everything up, making your video shorter. You can export directly to YouTube or create video files for further editing in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, or similar programs.

But here's where it gets interesting and, admittedly, a bit creepy. If you mess up or want to change something, you can type out what you want it to say and insert your digital AI voice. Yes, I can say that's on the edge of creepy town. The platform can learn your voice, your mannerisms, and how you speak by having you read through a script. It records this, sends it to Descript's servers, and processes it through AI to make it sound like you're speaking whatever you type.

There are also free voice examples available, including some famous voice actors. I'm sure you've heard those faceless YouTube videos with that distinctive AI sound where the speech pattern goes, "And it's also going to be a very good time at the pilgrims." The tone and connotation don't really sound human-ish. I know I go that route too, but at least I'm human, last time I checked.

Descript isn't the only option for text-based video editing. You can do similar work in the paid version of DaVinci Resolve. It's about 300 bucks, but it's a one-time payment, not a subscription like Adobe. Premiere Pro offers similar functionality for around $20-22 monthly, but that's subscription-based.

Gaming and Live Streaming Applications

Many people in the gaming and live streaming space use services like CapCut or newer platforms that are still in development. There's River.com, which I believe is still on a waiting list and not fully available to the public yet. It uses AI to analyze your live stream videos and pull out clips it thinks would be interesting, like clutch game plays, headshots, or last-man-standing moments.

This type of service has been around for years in the form of Athenascope. If you've been live streaming since before COVID times, Athenascope was the go-to AI clip generator. It did an excellent job going through hours of your live stream content. You'd tell it what game you were playing, say Overwatch, and it would know to look for victories, defeats, kills, deaths, and similar moments. It would create little snippets that you could use for TikTok, Twitter, or wherever you wanted to post them.

Smartly, it would also take those clips and create two or three-minute montages with DMCA-free soundtracks. You could post these as "best clips of the week" content on your social media networks.

Unfortunately, Athenascope disappeared for reasons I'm not sure about. One week everything was going great, then they posted a tweet saying they were closing shop. The next month, users had to scramble to download anything they wanted to save. There wasn't really anything at that level available for a couple of years until CapCut introduced AI features, and now we have River and other platforms that are building on what Athenascope originally offered.

Podcast Production Made Simple

When it comes to podcasting, like what I'm doing here, AI can be incredibly helpful, but the workflow is a bit different. One of the best applications is using AI generators for transcripts, blog posts, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, chapter markers, and title ideas.

This is where I think you can save yourself hours per episode instead of doing everything manually. Programs like Podium will take your audio file, run it through their AI system, and produce a transcript, episode summary, keyword listings for YouTube, and different show note options. It typically gives you three different versions based on what it thinks your episode was geared toward. For this episode, it might give me a casual style option, another that's friendly, and a third that's professional. You can choose which style fits your episode guide or description best.

Podium also includes chapters and something called Podium GPT, where you can say, "Take this episode and write me a blog post describing it," and it'll do that for you. Then you can say, "Take this blog post and truncate it to less than 500 words," and you can edit the most relevant parts from there.

Now, these services aren't cheap because they're using significant system resources to do all this work. Podium gives you at least three hours free to try it out, but if you want just three hours a month, you're looking at $14 monthly. That only works if you have very short episodes. I was using it on early bird pricing before they increased rates. I was paying about $30 a month for 10 hours, but now it's $47 per month for 10 hours, or $40 monthly if you pay yearly.

There are alternatives like Cast Magic that work similarly but with different pricing structures. They charge by minutes: 300 minutes for $23 monthly, or 800 minutes for $100 monthly on their starter plan.

I know what you're thinking: "Holy crap, that's expensive. I might as well do it myself." Yes, you can do it yourself for free, but you have to consider what it's actually costing you in time.

The Time Value Equation

Let's say you do a one-hour podcast like the Independent Creator, which typically runs 35 to 60 minutes. After editing and cleaning everything up, you want to create good chapters, figure out which sections work for chapter breaks, type out the transcript by listening, stopping, starting, and typing it all out. That's going to take hours.

When you look at podcast production, the transcription, subtitles, chapters, chapter notes, keywords, and everything else for one episode could take you several hours. Or you can pay someone to do it, and they'll spend several hours on it too. Or you can use AI.

When I was using Podium, I'd upload a one-hour podcast, and it would take a couple of minutes to upload, then 10 to 15 minutes for processing, depending on the episode length. At most, 30 minutes, and it would produce a complete transcription, various show note options, and chapters.

So for 40 to 50 bucks a month, you can save hours per episode. I can see where my time is saved. While it processes for 30 minutes, I can start building up next week's episode, work on clips, or handle other tasks while it does the boring, tedious work.

That's why I say AI is a tool. Use it smartly, but don't rely on it completely because it won't get everything correct. There will be spelling mistakes and hearing errors. In my case, when I say "Guilded," it types "gilded" (G-I-L-D-E-D) instead of the correct "Guilded" (G-U-I-L-D-E-D) for the company name. Sometimes it spells "OwnCast" correctly halfway through but starts misspelling it later, or vice versa.

You have to be its editor. It's doing the hard work, but it will make mistakes. You still need the mindset that you'll have to review and edit to ensure it's working correctly. The good news is that it can learn from your edits and try to improve itself.

Browser-Based Solutions

There are also browser-based services that integrate AI workflow on the backend. One of these is Riverside. If you watched my last episode live or caught it later, you might have noticed something different: I used Riverside to record that particular episode.

Riverside is a great service if you don't have the computer capability for live streaming and recording, and you don't want to purchase or upgrade your computer. You can use a browser-based service like Riverside FM for recording and live streaming. The nice thing about Riverside is that you can produce content for live streaming while also using your computer resources to create higher-quality recordings that eventually upload to your account.

You can set up streaming using your laptop's camera and a $30 Fifine microphone plugged into USB. That's really all you need for a great podcast. Too many people get hung up thinking they need the latest and greatest equipment: a $2,500 camera setup with the correct lens, proper mounting, a $400 Shure SM7B plugged into a Rodecaster Pro 2. Just stop. Really, you don't need all that.

You just need a camera (you don't even need one if you don't want video), and you can use your phone, laptop camera, or pick up a C920. They're cheap, less than a hundred bucks, sometimes less than 50 if you buy from Facebook Marketplace. You don't need the latest and greatest computer either because most of the processing and recording, especially with Riverside, happens on their servers.

Going back to AI, Riverside does transcription for you, provides subtitle files, and will remove silent parts from your episode using AI. They also have AI for creating clips. It analyzes your episode, identifies segments about specific topics, and creates 30 or 60-second clips that you can edit and post on TikTok, Twitter, or wherever you'd like.

Honestly, if someone asked me what to do if they don't have a great computer but want to start a podcast, I'd direct them to Riverside. I'm not paid or sponsored by them, but the pricing is affordable. The pro plan is $30 monthly and gives you 15 hours of separate audio and video tracks per month for recording on their website. If you record elsewhere and upload your videos, you get all the same AI transcription, subtitles, and editing features without affecting your time allocation.

If you do an hour-long podcast weekly, you're only using four hours of your 15-hour allocation, giving you plenty of buffer for other projects using their AI system.

Writing and Content Creation

AI also provides great options for writing assistance. Magic AI (I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce it) does excellent work for writing, title ideas, and content generation. It's based on ChatGPT but adds their own features.

I use it frequently for video ideas. I can say, "Give me 10 video ideas on Guilded," and include Guilded.gg so it looks at the website and provides relevant suggestions. The nice thing about Magic AI is that it incorporates personas. Instead of manually telling ChatGPT to "pretend you are a YouTube editor" or "pretend you are a copywriter," Magic AI has these built in. You can select from different profiles like YouTube professional, copywriter, or script writer, each putting a different spin on what it presents based on your prompt.

You can create custom personas and upload files to feed the AI important context by uploading documents directly into the chat. This is similar to what you can do with paid ChatGPT. I know Leah LaPorte on Twitter wanted to learn a programming language called Lisp. He created a persona that would only look at books he uploaded and stay within that specific context without gathering information from elsewhere on the web. It only knew the information he provided, which prevented it from being "tainted" by random web content.

Magic AI has similar pricing to other services. They recently updated their rates. The professional plan offers 80,000 words and 20 workspaces, which is typically what you'd want. Personal Plus provides 50,000 words for about $20 monthly. It also includes some image generation capabilities, similar to Midjourney or DALL-E, with different pricing tiers for agency, enterprise, and professional plus plans.

Embracing AI as a Creative Tool

Don't be swayed into thinking AI will replace content creators. I know recently, with Sora's release, Tyler Perry mentioned he was going to spend $800 million on studio improvements in Georgia, but after seeing what AI could do, he decided against it. That's kind of fear-mongering, in my opinion. Yes, AI can do many things, but it doesn't have the human touch that we can recognize. We can spot when a portrait has six fingers when we know the person doesn't have six fingers.

Going into 2024 and beyond, AI will continue improving. Look at how much it's advanced in just the past five years. It's going to get better and better. We can use these tools to make our workflows faster while AI handles the boring, tedious stuff that would normally take us hours. We can work on setting up new episodes, writing scripts, or handling other creative tasks.

You have to think about it this way: AI can do much of what we can do, but it's not necessarily better. It's just capable of doing it. We still need to review what it produces to ensure it meets our quality standards before we're proud to post it.

Just recently, YouTube announced that anything you post using AI for image generation or video must be marked as AI-generated. There's a large part of YouTube's audience that has concerns about AI capabilities, and yes, there are legitimate things to be cautious about. But don't let that fear dictate how you interact with the world or create your content.

I've seen some fascinating applications, like technology that can change movie dialogue from R-rated to PG-13 by replacing F-bombs with "freak" or "freakin'," or translate content into Japanese or Spanish while making the lips look like the actor is speaking the language correctly, not just dubbed over.

Mr. Beast and other YouTubers used to create separate channels in Spanish or French, but they don't really need to anymore. AI can scrub through their videos and make it look like they're speaking Japanese, catering to audiences they'd normally need to outsource translation for. Sometimes human translation gets messed up or doesn't sound correct due to cultural differences in how words and phrases are used in different contexts.

The Future of Content Creation

We have to learn to embrace AI because it's not going anywhere. It's here to stay. We can either let it take over and worry about Terminator scenarios, or we can embrace it as another tool in our toolbelt to make our lives easier.

Remember when computers and the internet were supposed to make our lives so much easier that we'd be drinking mimosas on the beach while technology handled the hard work? Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Instead of doing less work, we decided we could do more work in the same amount of time. We kind of screwed ourselves in that aspect.

Hopefully, people smarter than me will use AI as a tool to actually make our lives easier and offload some of the work we usually do. Just make sure to review what AI produces to ensure it's correct.

I want to be transparent: I use AI in my workflows constantly for writing, figuring out ideas, titles, and descriptions. I can have it read my transcript and summarize it, add time codes for YouTube videos, or create keyword listings under 500 characters. Of course, you have to review it because AI will misspell things. I misspell things too. I'm not perfect, and neither is AI, but we can use it to make our lives easier.

If anything from my rambling tonight, I want you to know that AI isn't to be feared. Just use it to help yourself create better content than you normally would without overwhelming yourself or burning out.

Wrapping Up

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you visit twotonewaffle.com. I have a weekly newsletter called the Weekly Waffle that covers different aspects of content creation, alternative platforms, and indie gaming, delivered straight to your inbox.

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Thanks for watching or listening to the Independent Creator Podcast, and I'll see you next time. Later taters.

The Independent Creator