How much does an audio drama podcast make?

Yes it sounds like a bold statement. I called Gemini out on that and it admitted that it over-egged its confidence on that assertion.

But presumably the LLMs do have some knowledge about how they are used?

On further probing Gemini did give a plausible justification - in summary:

"Creation is easy. Selection is hard. In an era of infinite content, the "most successful" writer isn't the one who can produce the most; it's the one with the best taste. Using an LLM as a distillation machine allows a writer to iterate through their own ideas at 10x speed, discarding the "average" and keeping only the "potent."

The irony!

Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.

When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.

It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).

FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).

I'm not sure quite how that works. Google Docs will suggest various changes which I take into account or don't. And they certainly correct misspellings. You can choose to decide that's not AI but it's a grey line.

For writing I've sometimes used LLMs to speed up some essentially boilerplate. Never used for something that's not pretty much routine that I could easily do but would probably spend some time doing so.

For anything that might be a Nebula submission, it's hard to imagine LLMs doing anything beyond the copyediting level (which may not be well-defined but seems a reasonable threshold).

That’s excellent, more respectable groups need to take this kind of strong stance.

I’m writing my first sci-fi novel, and I’m using it for two main things. One, as a basic sanity check for the story, pacing, internal consistency, character development, etc, and basic copy editing. I’ve also used it to generate images for settings to go in the lore bible, so I can pin down what I see in my head into something tangible that I won’t forget. This isn’t the only step, I have human beta readers to double check the LLM, but it often tells me easily verifiable things, and it is often right, (for instance, this sentence reads funny), so it definitely adds value in that sense. Subjective things are a bit harder to trust, but that can be the same thing with subjective feedback from humans too, though of course the difference is that the LLM isn’t going to buy my book, whether or not it loves it.

> Genuine question: what's harming your experience in current podcasting apps?

Oh, where do I begin beyond just saying they are trash. I've used all the big names and each one seems like it was created with a the same basic idea in mind: show the latest episodes of a podcast, and have some form of pagination. Which is fine if that's all your podcast does and isn't meant to be listened to from the beginning.

But the moment your pod cast might have different shows or parts or otherwise intend to start at the beginning, it's suddenly hit or miss. Basically, it makes an assumption about how podcasts should work and ignores the reality of popular podcasts out there.

Not to mention some are just obtuse to use. I forget which one but I was trying to add a feed to a popular one and there was NO where to add my own feed. Spent five minutes looking and there was no way to add a URL feed. Like, that's core 101 functionality.

Like I said, I tried the popular ones and they all were annoying to use. I realize this comment doesn't help much, mostly because it was earlier this year that I tried them out and became frustrated so it's mostly me thinking through how much they sucked and not much on the specifics.

I think the best way I can think of it is they all did the bare minimum and stopped.

I use Apple's Podcast app because it's free, it syncs, and it while it sucks, I don't want to pay for something that isn't better than free.

I'm on iOS, so AntennaPod won't work for me.

> I understand where you're coming from, but after a long period of stagnation Patreon is improving massively year over year.

Yep. I've seen the improvements. My comment I feel stands for Dec 26, 2025, as an accurately reflection of their current state.

> As for podcasting apps, I use Pocketcasts and I'm very happy with it.

I tried Pocketcasts. It's what helped make up my rant above.