Comment by BeetleB

> In the near future, a significant portion of YouTube videos and podcasts will likely be AI-generated

It's not helpful that you're making a binary distinction here.

As an example, as much as 10 years ago, I would find Youtube videos where the narration was entirely TTS. The creators didn't want to use their own voice, and so they wrote the script, and fed it into a TTS system. As you can expect from the state of the art at the time, it sounded terrible. Yet people enjoyed the videos and they had high view counts.

Are we calling this AI-generated?

We now have better TTS (without generative AI). Way better. I presume those types of videos are now better for me to watch. You may still be able to tell it's not a human because the tone doesn't have much variance. You'd probably have to listen for a minute or longer to discern that, though.

Are we calling this AI-generated?

Now with generative AI, we have voices that perhaps you won't be able to identify as AI. But it's all good as long as a human wrote the script, right?

Are we calling this AI-generated?

Finally, take the same video. The creator writes the script, but feels he's not a good writer (or English is not his native tongue, and he likely has lots of grammatical errors). So he passes his script to GPT and asks it to rewrite it - and not just fix grammatical errors but have it improve it, with some end goal in mind ("This will be the script for a popular video...") He then reviews that the essence he was trying to capture was conveyed, and goes ahead with the voice generation.

Is this AI-generated?

To me, all of these are fine, and not in any way inferior to one with a completely human workflow. As long as the creator is a human, and he feels it is conveying what he needed to convey.

I would love to take a first draft of a blog post, send it to GPT, and have it write it for me. The reason I don't is that so far, whatever it produces doesn't have my "voice". It may capture what I meant to say, but the writing style is completely different from mine. If I could get GPT/Claude to mimic my style more, I'd absolutely run with it. Almost no one likes endless editing - especially writers!