Noel Miller says TMG Studios will stay fully human-made as it moves into fictional podcasts

Noel Miller, the former Vine star who founded podcast company TMG Studios in 2021, has ruled out generative AI at the network, telling Tubefilter he is content for it to be the last human-led channel standing if everything else ends up machine-made. Five years in, the company runs 11 shows with different hosts and subjects.

The interview came as TMG launches Superior Exotics II, a semi-scripted series in which comedians Milo Tucker-Meyer and Kyle Chase play staff at a struggling Orange County convenience store. Each episode of about 40 minutes is recorded live as one of their shifts; the setting and planned guest entrances are written ahead, but the scenes are improvised as a rotating cast of customers walks in. Fiction is still a small corner of podcasting next to talk formats, Tubefilter notes, because it needs rarer skills and more time, even if shows such as Welcome to Night Vale, The Magnus Archives and Critical Role have found big audiences.

Miller argues that two people chatting about their lives no longer holds much value and that the lines between podcasts, YouTube channels and other formats have dissolved. He credits the two leads for the show's appeal and says TMG wants talent with strong on-camera presence that bigger studios might pass over, so it can bring people from different corners of the internet together in fictional projects, which he likens to superhero team-ups. Building that roster comes first, he says, because the worlds depend on who builds them.

He blames the struggles of older media institutions on rigid structures for distribution and careers, which the internet tore down. In a feed full of clickbait and ragebait, where people struggle to tell real from fake, he finds that blurring both demoralising and exciting.

On AI, he says human creative independence matters more than ever. Making work that is not a "slop farm" means fighting the algorithm for attention, he says, and that commitment is what makes it rewarding. Tubefilter notes that AI features are pushed at users across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram and have entered many creators' workflows. Superior Exotics II is out now on TMG's site and its own YouTube channel.