[diminikolaou]

For the time being, realistically it’s cost prohibitive for users to generate slop without expectation for some return, so that’s a current natural mechanism.

As the prices decrease, due to model improvement, best/worst practice guides, and promotion of successful use cases may act as an additional mechanism to prevent such cases.

Realistically though, given that we’re lowering the bar of podcast creation to effectively the level of blog creation there might be an increase in slop content. I think that’s a necessary problem when you lower the barrier, but there will always be proper curation in the aggregator level. I think HM is the perfect example. Internet has made blogging so easy and there is so much slop. But it goes unnoticed given the curation.

[mcpackieh]

I think you should only offer this service to people who are willing to first record the podcast in their own voice. Then your service could provide utility by replacing their voice to cleaning up their audio, removing speech impediments (e.g. "uh uh um um um"), translating to other languages, editing in music, etc. Lots of people aren't good at reading/speaking so this service could be very useful to them, but you should make them prove the content is worth their own time by making them record at least a rough reading of the script themselves.

If the creator can't be bothered to read the script, it would be a waste of time for anybody else to listen to it.

[diminikolaou]

I actually think I disagree with your last sentence.

It's not that the creator can't be bothered, but that the tool unlocks features that are just not feasible for a creator. Think of Hacker News Recap for example - a 20' episode has been generated every single day for the past 122 days. That's extremely hard for a person to do. So the consistency that this enables is one feature.

Automatic translation and video generation are other features that using this method of podcast creation lead to. So it's not necessarily that the "creator can't be bothered to"... there's inherently more value in some use cases to create a podcast this way over the traditional method.