How to disable AI generated chapter markers?
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This feature rolled out to the web player this week. Unfortunately I find them inaccurate and intrusive. How can we turn it off?
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We don’t currently have a way to disable them, but I’ve forwarded this feedback along to our team to take into consideration as we refine the feature going forward.
Could you share with us a bit more about the inaccuracy and intrusiveness? Is there a specific podcast episode where you found the generated chapters particularly inaccurate? And there a specific area of the interface that you find problematic with this new feature?
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Thanks for addressing this, I’d like to disable them as well.
For me the main issue is that the chapter title replaces the episode title, which I’d like to be able to see at a glance. I’m also not interested in seeing potential spoilers for story-based podcasts. And frankly, I don’t care to know what AI thinks my show is about; I’d rather listen and find out for myself.
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@drestuart thank you for sharing your feedback on this as well! I’ve added your comment to the feature request for this!
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One of the things that annoys me the most about this feature is that I’d much rather see the title of the episode when I look at my now playing, and then I often use the title of the show to get to the feed and download more episodes – with the chapters shown, I cannot simply select the show title and go to the show’s feed. And the arrows provide more places where I can accidentally touch the screen in the wrong spot and mess up where I am within the episode.
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@reallyshadowy1c00dd4701 thank you for sharing your feedback on this. I’ve forwarded it along to our development team to take into consideration as we refine the Now Playing screen design going forward.
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I would also like to disable this feature (as well as the AI generated auto transcription), both of which I find intrusive and unwanted. It’s odd that you forced this on your user base with no way to disable it when you must know that large portions of your user base hate generative AI and want nothing to do with it?
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give us a way to disable this garbage quickly. they’re horrendously inaccurate and I don’t want anything to do with AI slop at all. stop shoving crap down our throats without a way to turn it off while you STILL can’t seem to comprehend the words “batch edit” after more than ten years of asking
and do podcast creators know you’re feeding their intellectual property to the slop machine for this?
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Terrible feature . Doesn’t work and it completely undermines the creative integrity of the podcast creator. Please turn it off.
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I spent this morning searching for a way to disable this feature as well. They’re silly and distracting, and offer nothing helpful to my listening experience.
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Agreed. DIstracting and another example of Ai en$hittif… I was trying to just rewind and the titles kept changing. I had no idea what episode I was in. I just wanted to go back like a minute or two in the progress bar. Just allow a checkbox that disables chapters.
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Just adding a +1. I want to be able to disable all AI features. I don’t need transcripts and I don’t need chapters, let alone at the huge cost that comes with rampant AI use.
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Yeah. IIt keeps sending me to the end of the podcast and archiving it. I just want to go to the beginning. Every time I move the slider it snaps to the end. Horrible feature
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Please stop pushing features onto users without the option to disable them- especially ones that you yourself note “may not be accurate”. Double especially when they’re AI garbage. Seeing a podcast I love have autogenerated trash chapters bolted onto it actively makes me like your app less. Thanks.
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I’ll add to the discussion that it’s really unsettling to have english titles for other podcast languages — for example french.
And no, they didn’t talk about the “FIFA World Cup Meal at McDonald’s” for 17 minutes. It was a 10-second ad.
Let me at least disable it.
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Strongly dislike this feature, and would at least like it to be a thing I can disable. AI garbage isn’t really the thing I’m looking for in a podcasts app. First thing in 10+ years of usage that has made me strongly reconsider switching to a non-AI alternative.
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Hey, pocketcasts devs. This is awful. Stop it. The chapters suck, they make everything read like slop, they’re generally wrong, they aren’t placed anywhere well. The “feature” is bad. The lack of control is worse.
When you force something extremely, obviously wrong onto everything, and force everyone to use it, you’re saying you think your whole audience is dumb. You are saying you disrespect us. Every QA of yours likely told you this was dumb and wrong and you did it anyway, so it’s not just us you’re disrespecting, it’s everyone working on the product, too.
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I also want an option to go back to the previous way that showed the episode title! Please and thank you – this update was confusing and not having a way to turn it off seems short-sighted.
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I agree with everything said here, especially that the title of the show is what I use to navigate to other episodes, wanting to know the episode title at a glance, and the chapters are unnecessary and intrusive. Pocket casts is not good enough of an app that I won’t just jump ship because of this: I’m looking for an alternative now, and if this isn’t fixed then the inconvenience of moving will be less than the inconvenience of staying.
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