For grown-ups
Every source for every episode of Are You Still Listening?, with a link to read each one.
Each episode has its own page. It gives a full citation for each source, the exact passages we quote, and the words we cut.
Episodes
How we make the episodes
- The scripts
- Claude, an AI, writes the scripts. Will doesn't write them. He chooses the subjects, sets the rules, checks every episode and decides which episodes go out.
- The voices
- Kate, Helen and the people from history are voices made with AI, using ElevenLabs. Will is real, and he records his own lines.
- The words from history
- The people from history only say words they wrote, or words someone wrote down at the time. The words come from public-domain editions and translations, linked on each episode’s page. Each quote is 30 words or fewer.
- The quote check
- A checking tool fetches each linked original. It looks for every quoted line in it, word by word and in order. Old spellings count as a match. A line passes when the tool finds at least nine in ten of its words in one original.
- The fact check
- An AI model reads every sentence Kate, Helen and Will say, beside the episode’s list of sources. A sentence passes if the sources state it, or if it is the meaning of a word or common knowledge.
- Wikipedia’s sources
- Where a fact comes from Wikipedia, the episode’s page shows the source Wikipedia gives for it. A tool finds that source. Where it is online, the tool reads it and asks an AI model whether it says the same. The page shows what the tool found, including where Wikipedia gives no source.
- Quotations
- Some sources are modern books and web pages still in copyright. We quote them briefly, 30 words at most, and acknowledge each one in full on this site, as UK law allows for quotation (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 30). The podcast doesn’t read the citations out. We give them in full on this site. Free copies come first. Where a modern book has an ISBN, we also link to it on Amazon UK.
- Before release
- Will releases an episode only when every quote and every sentence passes.
- What the checks can’t do
- The checking tool finds each quote in its source, and the AI model finds each fact in a source. Neither can tell whether a source is right. On the children’s pages, we ask children to judge that for themselves, with three questions: who wrote it, when did they write it, and were they there? See How to check a source.