Why Health & Wellness Podcasters Need to Be Careful About Using AI

Are you tired of talking about AI yet? I kind of am, but it’s not going away anytime soon. And of course, AI tools can be great for time saving and helping with creativity, saving money, and a whole lot more. And of course, they’re only getting better. But in the meantime, as we learn how these tools can improve our lives, it’s good to recognize the limitations.

As well and be aware of potential issues as we implement these AI tools into our workflows, especially in the health and wellness space where trust and credibility is key. Today I’m sharing some things to keep in mind when it comes to using AI for your podcast.

So you can avoid the embarrassing mistakes and problems that I’ve been seeing. I’m Joel Oliver. This is Profits Through Podcasting where we help health-focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting.

So While mistakes and glitches may matter less when it comes to hobby podcasts in the health and wellness space where we are trying to build trust and credibility, and in some cases even even dealing with industry regulations, everything counts.

That’s why I become a little concerned when seeing podcasts just flying out that had been shoved through an ai. A few buttons clicked, and then it’s off into the void and onto the next one time. And cost savings, of course, can be very appealing, and AI is great for that in many cases, but it’s important to be aware when it could be working against us.

I see many, many podcasts on a weekly basis, and I’ve noticed a lot of problems caused by ai. That I want to tell you about. So if you are using AI to do some or all of your podcast production, you can do it in a way that is not detrimental to your brand or reputation. So we’ll begin with the foundation, which is editing, which basically every podcast episode needs.

Now I do need to get on my soapbox for a few minutes here to talk about editing, so apologies in advance, but uh, it’s an important conversation, so. As podcasting became more popular over say, the last 10 to 15 years, this has been happening, but really more so in the last five years, mass consumers were starting to be introduced to audio equipment.

Recording equipment, uh, audio and video editing software and other technical things that really wasn’t so common before. Now, of course, here in these later years, like with Zoom and USB microphones and game streaming and cameras, all that, like all that exploded further. So it’s just commonplace these days for a lot of people.

It all became a lot more accessible. And now we’ve got tools where virtually anybody can do things like edit audio and video, you know, by text, just like you’re using Microsoft Word, . So this is where I need my soapbox. Having been professionally trained as an audio engineer, back in a time when this stuff was like I’m saying, all the more complex and inaccessible.

You know, it just wasn’t a thing that someone had a professional microphone in their home or knew what an audio editing software was or how to use it. This was like professional level stuff in most cases, but. even with the, the situation we find ourselves in today where it is all a lot more accessible and mainstream, it does remain that there is a difference between actually doing something right and thinking you’ve done something right.

So whether it’s with the advancements that we’ve got now, or in the earlier days, like I was talking about, the one thing that I know hasn’t changed is the concept of you don’t know what you don’t know. So how I used to see this was podcasters just watching a few YouTube tutorials, managing to get a recording done and exported and thinking, I did it.

This is great. What many people weren’t aware of was issues like chopping off the ends of words ’cause they just didn’t really hear that detail removing all the breaths. So it sounded really unnatural. Levels being way too loud and sounding really distorted or distressed and really annoying to listen to sound quality being very poor, one speaker being very low, and the other being very loud, or the intro being very loud and the episode really low.

All sorts of things that you might not be aware of if you didn’t have that experience and understanding of how to do this, uh, in a professional manner. Now AI tools and newer technology have helped improve some of these things, but they have also introduced a slew of new issues. For example, the automatic, um, and uh, or filler word removal that I hear commonly removing words that shouldn’t have been removed.

It accidentally detects something as an, um, that’s not, and then you find that there’s a word that was important and it’s just deleted right out of the show. Sound enhancement. Tools that do the same thing. They can create a very artificial or robotic sound that can also sometimes remove words or add strange sounds that shouldn’t be there.

These types of things. And now I will totally accept the criticism that some of this doesn’t matter that much. Like who really cares if a word was missing? You know, I saved a bunch of time or, or money. And okay. Like I said, I accept that criticism. That’s a debate that we, we could have, , and maybe a DIY solution is perfectly fine in certain cases, and a professional audio engineer is just not gonna make a world of a difference, in my opinion.

The answer to all this is that, that that depends. What I know, or I strongly believe that is not good is this use of AI to just click a few buttons and export something without even listening to it. Even if it’s something that a listener might not realize, consciously, subconsciously, they can get the impression that this is just not professional.

’cause you know, we all know whatever our experience level is with audio production or video production, when you turn on a professional. polished podcast or a YouTube video versus an amateur one. You just know like, this doesn’t look professional versus this does okay. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that.

So my point here, the conclusion on what to be careful with when using AI for podcast editing is don’t just trust what it’s doing on its own. Don’t just export and throw it out there without listening to it. First, I highly recommend if you insist on doing things yourself and you’re using these AI tools, review the work and make manual fixes, and we’re talking about the health and wellness space here, right?

The, the trust, the credibility. If you wanna have a podcast, we are, random words are missing or people are just noticing this is, you know, kind of sounds amateur like, I don’t know if I want to pay this person five grand for their coaching package. You know, it just doesn’t gel in my opinion. And that’s what I’ve seen.

And the people that we’re working with are at a higher level and they value that kind of quality more. they see that that type of stuff really counts, right? For many of our clients who are choosing to come work with us versus just throwing it through an AI or some other kind of DIY method, they want the time savings and they want the peace of mind.

They don’t care how we achieve our results. They don’t care about the cost or at least the, the cost that we charge is reasonable to them. It’s just imperative that what goes out, looks and sounds professional. If they need something done, they just send us a quick message. They’re not having to dive into a software and deal with updates and feature changes and bugs or whatever else.

They’re not audio editors. They don’t care. They don’t want to know how it works. They just want it done. They don’t understand the technical ins and outs of creating content. They’re busy. They just want it reliably. Done, and then they’re onto the next thing. So that’s a, that’s a consideration when you look at should I be doing it myself or hiring someone?

But like I said, at the very least, don’t just click the button and assume what the AI spits out is going to be. Perfect.

On that note. Moving on from editing, let’s get to the next way that you can use AI for your podcast and how to avoid potential downfalls. Let’s talk about the show notes. As we all know, AI makes writing much more efficient. It can be a little AI ish in what it outputs, but whether it’s through prompting or manual editing afterwards.

AI can make life a lot easier in these cases. And you know, I remember this, it wasn’t too long ago that to do these summaries, you had to listen to a whole podcast episode either in real time or you’d speed it up a little bit, but manually make notes as you listen through the episode and then craft the show notes from that.

Nowadays we can use AI to listen to the episode in seconds and give us a summary or give us some highlights and then we. As humans if we want, if we choose to, can craft that into something that, uh, is much better than what the AI automatically makes on its own, but like I’m saying, in a, a lot shorter period of time.

Now, the thing to watch for here is similar to the last section. Do not just blindly use what the AI gives you. And what problems have I seen with this? Why am I telling you this? Well, first of all, the AI referring to the host as the guest or vice versa, not knowing who said what or whose name was what, and mixing it up like misquoting people in the notes saying that one person said something when it was actually the other person.

Placeholders left in the notes, like, insert link here. But that, that’s what I’m reading as a. A consumer, a listener of the podcast that was put into the show notes because the host or whoever didn’t even bother to look at what they’re sharing to the public. Insert link to chorus here. Okay. No link was provided, relating to that complete blind copy and pasting so that other AI text is left in there.

Not just the placeholder stuff, but you know, if you use chat GPT or Grok for this stuff, it’ll often say at the end, let me know what you think. If this was the right style or you’d like any changes, just let me know and I can do that. So we’re not only just copying the show notes, but we’re copying this other stuff from the AI right into the.

The description field and it’s going out in the podcast for people to read in in their apps. Of course, AI can also hallucinate this is a little bit of a less issue when it comes to show notes ’cause it’s referencing your actual episode. But it still should be said.

It can just make up things. It can make up references, right? And uh, I’ve heard about this in the health and wellness space specifically from, say, a copywriter who has to deal with this. And there are regulations around what people can put out. And AI has often given false information, and that’s really problematic in this space.

So again, point for proof reading and at least looking over what the AI generates for you. Another thing is inconsistency in voice. Either from one episode to another or between, say your show notes and your website, your social media. You know, branding is a big deal. You want this all to be consistent, and I’ve seen people who have a really specific way of talking in their copy on their website or in their social media, but then the show notes are very strange, like really excited or a lot of exclamation points that just doesn’t align. So you can address that with prompting or proofreading or whatever you want to do, but you know, again, you’re just letting the AI do whatever it wants or having your assistant just, just throw stuff out there and not checking it over.

It’s not good. And keep in mind as well, repurposing is also great. I love talking about repurposing from your podcast. It’s a great way to save time and generate more content, but. Once again, I feel like a broken record. If you’re just thinking AI’s just gonna churn out a newsletter for you from your podcast or a blog post in this generic voice.

Just doing what AI does really think twice about that. You know, a while back we heard a story about a newsletter who had a really big engaged audience, and they started doing an AI generated, part of their newsletter once a week, and the unsubscribed started happening. People were very angry because they’d come to expect a certain style and tone and quality from this newsletter, and they were, they were onto it.

They could just see this is just AI slop, this is junk. This is not what I signed up for, and they were gone. Okay, we’re all getting really attuned to this, whether it’s on LinkedIn or a blog post or email, or anything else. We can just see when it’s a low effort, AI generated post, and you don’t want to become associated with that.

So if you’re using the AI to help you save time on your podcast show notes, make sure that you are putting your proper touch, your proper voice on it, and. Please watch for those placeholders and make sure that what you’re putting out there is of quality and sounds like you, it’s a great time saving tool, but let’s be, uh, let’s not be greedy in how much time we actually wanna save.

Okay? If you feel that you’re putting content out that’s worthy of someone’s attention, your audience’s attention, have a little pride in what you’re doing and make sure that it is actually of quality.

Next and final one that I want to address here in terms of being careful when using AI to do the production for your podcast is social media clips. So chopping up short clips from your podcast, short videos, putting those out on social media, that’s a great method of repurposing the podcast and efficiently creating some additional content for your social media.

I think it’s great, but yet again, AI is not perfect and should not be used to just throw out 50 pieces of low quality junk that you never even look at. To all of your social platforms in the click of a button. You know, I see this stuff promoted by these websites that do it. Just click a button and boom, 50 pieces are gone and scheduled on all your platforms.

You don’t have to think about it. Like, let’s take a step back here and really consider what of, what quality can that stuff really be? Are there 50 amazing moments in your, your episode? I don’t know. I would rather maybe tone it down and focus on quality over quantity, like that just sounds. Wrong. And I am baffled when I see this stuff on, well, like on Instagram, where the captions have spelling mistakes, it got the complete wrong word and it didn’t, no one fixed it.

Or the clips end in the middle of a sentence like, you’re, you’re trying to hear what the point was and it just stops. Or I’ve seen, uh, the two people not centered properly on the screen. One person, half their face is cut off. I just, I think there’s such little regard for the audience here, like, why should I give this creator a second of my time when they couldn’t be bothered to even take some pride in what they’re putting out there?

They just use one of these automated things, threw out a bunch of clips and whatever. You know, here, here’s something I put absolutely no effort into. I didn’t care at all about how I present myself, and subsequently, if you work with me, you can expect that exact same sort of carelessness. It’s just, it’s just mind boggling.

To think that this is, is happening out there. Okay? And from our side of things at East Coast Studio, that’s not the level of quality we’re aiming for here. Clearly, uh, if you listen to this podcast or anyone who works with us at East Coast Studio, you would know this. We’re, we’re striving to be the best.

That’s what we’re doing for ourselves, for our clients. They’re trying to build trust. They’re trying to generate business. It’s very important in the health and wellness space. So any low quality content, anything on the verge of ai, slop, it just doesn’t cut it. You know, when we’re choosing the clips for social media for, for our clients, we do it.

With people. We look through the episode and we think, you know what? That was a really interesting clip. I like that. I’m gonna cut that up. We’re gonna check it for spelling and grammar. We’re gonna double check it before it goes out. Make sure there are no mistakes there. Because people take pride in stuff and, and your audience can tell, you know, if you’re a professional who’s doing things properly and cares about how they come across versus doesn’t care at all.

And it’s just trying to get this junk out there and hope somebody comes and follows them or does business with them, so if you are using AI for any or all of your podcast production, keep everything in mind that I’ve talked about in this episode.

Uh, there are other possibilities as well, like even using AI to generate a script and then emulate your voice in an episode so you don’t have to do anything. But I’m not even going. Okay. YouTube recently demonetized some AI generated content to try and prevent this stuff from happening and discourage it from being created and encourage effort being put into actual quality content creation.

So there are plenty of ways that you can use ai. To help save time and help you create better content. But, uh, in some of the ways that I talked about here today or some of these other ways people have been using it to just make junk, that’s not really the way to go. So find ways to use it, but still keep the quality there and keep yourself involved.

And a quick side note here too, as an example, there is a story not too long ago of a guy who ended up generating millions in fraudulent music royalties by using AI to generate over 150,000 songs.

And he was releasing them under a whole bunch of different, uh, fake band and artist names. And then, so not only did he have fake music, he used bots to generate fake streams and earn himself all that money. So we have fake. Crap. AI music being listened to by AI bots and he’s generating money that way. So this is the type of stuff that is flooding the, the market right now and the platforms that we’re trying to succeed on and cut through all the noise.

With genuine quality content. that’s not only going on with music, let me tell you. It’s obviously going on with podcasting as well, and YouTube videos and all over social media. And it’s not the type of thing you want to be associated with, nor is it a winning strategy to just try to make as much junk.

Content is possible. Okay? That’s not what we’re here for. I know you know that, but you wanna be careful when you’re using AI not to start slipping into that category without knowing it. I have no doubt as technology improves, AI is going to be able to help us more and more with less of the issues that I outlined today.

So this, this whole episode may be outdated within weeks, but I do believe that humans play a vital role here, and we are going to continue to do that. We want that connection so we can use these tools to help make life more efficient. But at the end of the day, we cannot just expect people to stick around and just take in bad content.

So all that said, I will give a shameless self plug here. If you are looking for a reliable human-based solution to help you create quality content that is going to resonate with your audience and build credibility and trust for you, and you can have that peace of mind that while you’re saving time, things are under control and the stuff that’s going out is of great quality, which is so important in this trust economy that we’re living in.

Let’s chat about it. That’s what we do here at East Coast Studio. We work only with people who share our values in creating this type of quality content that we can all be proud of and help improve lives. As always, there’ll be a link in the show notes where you can chat with us more about that. I’d love to hop on a call and learn about what you’re up to.

Thank you for listening, and we’ll catch you next time.