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Mike is founder of Music Radio Creative — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
This interview is from the Podnews Weekly Review
Mike Russell spoke at Radiodays Asia, a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, earlier this week.
Mike Russell: What did I feature in my session? A lot of tools that I think radio people, audio people, especially podcasters, can use in their processes.
We took a little look at ElevenLabs with voice cloning. Interesting that a lot of questions came up about how commercially safe a lot of these tools are, particularly as we’ve got big broadcasters here. I think we’re very much still in the wild west of AI at the moment, and things are yet to be decided. Aside all of the great tools like voice cloning, transcription, summarisation, was the ethics - do you have permission to clone a guest’s voice and change what they say, and where do we lie with the ethics on all of that stuff?
James Cridland: Where do the ethics go then? If I make a change and I get a generative AI tool to make my own voice because I messed up Sam’s name and I called him Steve, that’s kind of okay, isn’t it?
Mike Russell: Yeah, that’s okay. I think it gets a bit sketchy where you change the content of what people are saying, but I guess this is not new, right? Journalists have been used to cutting people to sound like they’re saying a certain thing forever, so now we can just do it with ease with AI, and I think that’s the difference.
I would certainly focus on the positive, like you’ve rightly pointed out there, we can use these tools to help us to make a job that would have been really hard. I’m definitely focusing on the positive human augmentation aspect, and not the replacement aspect.
JC: You mentioned ElevenLabs in there. What other tools were you talking about?
MR: I gave a use case for chat GPT for sales and marketing. I also introduced a lot of the room to Perplexity. I introduced Perplexity for summarizing things, and if you want to talk about something in a podcast or a radio show, you can quickly find relevant stories, summarize them and get, most importantly, citations.
So, unlike hallucinating language models, tools like Perplexity and others are now starting to show where they’ve got the information from, which is good. Still, you don’t know if you can trust the information source, but this is the the wider debate here. Will it link back to the traditional media companies like traditional radio stations and newspapers? It’s come from this source, so I know I can trust it?
JC: You do an awful lot of things on YoUTube, particularly around AI tools and other tools for audio creators. What do you do on there? And, secondly, where can people find that?
MR: Well, thank you. So yes, as you rightly mentioned, I’ve been on YouTube 14 years as Mike Russell. But now, earlier this year, I started a new channel called Creator Magic, and it’s about how can creators use AI in their process. I count creators as everyone, from someone working in a radio station trying to figure out how they can get these tools and use them, to an individual podcaster with an idea in their bedroom or their living room, and they want to use AI in the best way possible.
I did stress in my talk and here at the event, it’s important to keep that human connection. I think it’s important to connect with people and to be at events, because that’s really what keeps us human.
JC: Mike, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
MR: Thank you, James, great to be here.
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