Key Takeaways
To the author: do you use AI at all in the creative aspects of the production? I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers. I am interested to know your thoughts on this subject and if you use AI then what sort of methods do you use?
Note: Google Gemini reports that "the most successful writers in 2025 use me as a "distillation machine." They write 1,000 words of raw emotion, then ask me to help them find the "300 words that actually matter"
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."
Leave it to the reader to decide how informative that would be.
It absolutely is not. In fact the Nebula awards just banned entries from having _any_ AI use involved with them whatsoever. You can't even use them for grammar correction.
Well, they want to preserve a role for the editor; because the editor is not just checking the grammar but also the content, and weighing in with their relative objectivity on the current state of the story, what should be improved, what was good and what didn't work, etc. and if we have AI glazing us continuously we will just produce slop; it may look like good fiction but it will not read like it, and people can tell the difference!
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).
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).
I do sometimes use it as thesaurus on steroids when I can't think of the right word or if I need to check grammar / sentence structure (I'm not a native speaker). I would never use AI in the way Gemini self-reports (and I doubt that's really a thing anyway).
I might be tempted to use it for episode art if I didn't have access to a professional illustrator.
I am experimenting with some AI-generated music at the moment, but that's for background cues that I'd use canned royalty-free music for anyway (emotionally important scenes have tailored-made music done by a professional composer).
One way I'm eyeing to use AI in the future is as a way to translate what are currently audio stories into video. But I feel we're still not there.
As someone who subscribes to numerous Patreons including those which are podcasts… Patreon is horrible from a user perspective. It’s UX makes it so I hate when I have to use it. The less I need to use it, the better.
Couple that with the god awful pod casting apps that currently exist, it’s amazing podcasting is still so strong. It’s a testament to the creators that people will wade through such horrible UX to support the people and creators they do.
I've been using AntennaPod for a while and used a few different ones in the past. They all seemed to work well enough.
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.
Pocket Casts lets you select the episode order (as well as do things like group by season). I think it's pretty common to be able to add RSS feeds by putting them in the directory search field, and PC does this as well.
I've had absolutely zero problems using Pocket Casts to add custom Patreon feeds, and to listen to episodes in the other they came out.
I agree that adding by URL is a must. I find other features like ability to download an episode or "Mark as played" as super useful too.
As for podcasting apps, I use Pocketcasts and I'm very happy with it.
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.
I chronicle the ups and downs of creating a niche artistic product such as this in annual reports, the latest of which I just released last week. It offers a transparent view into what goes into making a creative project such as this, and also what you get out of it, because I share all the financial data down to specific revenue streams.
As such, I hope it can be of use to others who are undertaking a similar endeavour. Feel free to ask questions should you have any!
Cheers
I think it comes at an advantage for building a loyal fan base in audio drama podcasts though. The kind of fan base that may want to support you financially.
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