An Honest Take
Riverside’s AI Agents: How to Turn Them Off (and Why People Want To)
Riverside recently launched a team of AI agents, and the press coverage has been huge. Here’s the part they left out: how to turn the agents off, and why a lot of podcasters don’t want them.
By Joel Oliver, audio engineer and founder of SureTake. He ran a podcast editing studio for ten years before creating SureTake.
On October 26, 2026, Riverside launched Riverside Agents, a team of four AI agents, pitched as a Producer, Editor, Clipper, and Marketer that run your production for you. Forbes and the podcast press covered the launch, mostly from the company’s own announcement. What that coverage skipped is the reaction from the people who actually open Riverside every day to record, a lot of whom did not ask for this and are trying to get it out of their way.
Quick Answer
You can switch off Riverside’s AI features, but there’s a catch that’s at the center of the complaints: a full off switch is only available on the Business plan. Per Riverside’s own support documentation, an account owner or admin on Business can go into settings and toggle “Enable AI features” off for the account. On Pro and lower plans, there is no equivalent switch. You can minimize or ignore the agent panel, but users report it clutters the interface, pushes their projects down the page, and tends to reopen on its own. So if you’re on Pro and hoping to simply remove the agents, the honest answer is that you mostly can’t yet, and that gap is a big part of why the launch landed badly with paying users.
What Riverside Agents Actually Are
The press covered this part at length, so here’s the short version. Riverside Agents are four AI agents that take over the work around a recording. By Riverside’s own description, the Producer preps the session, the Editor builds the edit, the Clipper cuts shareable moments, and the Marketer writes posts and schedules them. They run on their own after you finish recording, and Riverside stresses that nothing publishes without your approval. That’s the pitch. The rest of this piece is about how it’s being received.
How to Turn the Agents Off
Here is what you can and can’t do today.
If you’re on the Business plan, you have a real off switch. An account owner or admin can open the account settings, find the team permissions, and turn off “Enable AI features,” which disables the AI tools across the account. Anything already created with AI stays accessible, but no new AI actions run until an admin turns the feature back on.
If you’re on Pro or a lower plan, there is no full disable. This is the sore point. On its own Facebook announcement, one podcaster asked Riverside directly whether Pro plans could disable the AI features, noting the site says only Business can. They called the interface “severely overwhelming” and argued the option “should be available to all your customers.” As of now, it isn’t.
What’s left for most users is minimizing or ignoring the agent panel, and that is exactly where the frustration sits. When a Riverside staffer told a user on Reddit they could “just not use them and minimize the panel,” the user pushed back: the panel “pushes the entire homepage down, hiding my recent projects, and clutters up the rest of the UI. It also tends to reopen,” and “constantly has alerts pretending to be unread messages.” Their point was the one Riverside dodged: “yes, I know I can ‘not use them,’ that wasn’t my question.” Another user recording live asked Riverside to let them turn the agents off during a session, because the on-screen draw is distracting when you’re in flow between takes.
So, what Riverside has now is a clean off switch on Business, and a workaround of minimize-and-ignore everywhere else, which many people find isn’t enough.
Why Podcasters Are Pushing Back
The deeper reaction isn’t really about one toggle. It’s about a pattern, and it breaks into a few clear complaints.
Users say it clutters the tool they’re paying to use. The theme running through the responses is that the agents get in the way of what people open Riverside to do: record and edit. The projects-pushed-down, panel-reopening, fake-unread-alerts complaint above is the clearest version. For a tool people pay for, having a new AI layer inserted between you and your work, with no way to fully remove it on most plans, is the core grievance.
One creator who tested the Clipper agent on video said plainly, “This is not a good product. It doesn’t work.” He described it as “super clunky, very hard to work with,” said the subtitles “completely bombed,” and noted that tools like Claude were already doing this kind of work for him more smoothly. Another podcaster put it simply: the new agents are more annoying than useful.
A lot of it, users point out, is work they could already do. On Riverside’s launch video on YouTube, a paying user pointed out that “much of this [is] already covered by features I already have,” and that the agents are “being framed as new capabilities, when most of this work was already possible before.” To its credit, Riverside replied, explaining that it upgraded the underlying models and that the difference is the agents act proactively and keep working after you close your computer. But another commenter wasn’t convinced, responding that the existing AI Co-Creator “does almost all of this already,” and that the agents “only create more lag than is needed.”
For other users, the bigger issue is that they’d rather Riverside fix the basics first. The frustration is that effort is going into AI theater while core reliability lags. One user, reacting to the agents on Reddit, asked Riverside to instead fix a bug where processed audio gets stuck on a spinning wheel until you refresh, saying that would be “a better use of the team’s time than, uh, making ‘agents’ that suck.” Another, also on the YouTube launch video, told Riverside that trying to outdo Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude “isn’t a smart business direction” and to “try focusing more on making a... light weight editor that actually does what it should.” And a user who was open to the idea still said the change made them feel like they have to relearn how Riverside works just to make content again.
There’s also a more thoughtful critique, aimed at the “production team” framing itself. As one commentator put it, giving AI agents job titles is “marketecture,” and the harder question is accountability: an AI Producer or Editor still needs a human who sets the standard, checks the output, and answers for it when it gets things wrong. Pitching a bot team as a replacement for a human one skips past who is actually responsible for the result.
Is the Backlash the Whole Story?
The reception is mixed, not unanimous. Plenty of high-volume creators welcomed the agents for taking rough cuts and clip-making off their plate, and the launch drew a wave of positive buzz on day one. Riverside has also been clear on the control question: it says nothing the agents produce goes live without your approval, and that you stay in the director’s chair. If you lean on AI editing and want more of it done for you, Riverside Agents may be exactly the direction you wanted.
The point isn’t that the agents are useless or that everyone hates them. It’s narrower: a large group of paying podcasters didn’t want an AI production crew bolted onto their recorder, can’t fully remove it unless they’re on the top plan, and are saying so across many platforms.
The Bigger Question: Do You Want AI in Your Recorder at All?
Here’s the thing that a “how to turn it off” guide can’t really solve. You can minimize today’s panel, but the direction is set. Riverside is an AI-first platform now, and the agents are the clearest statement yet of where it’s heading. If each update adds another AI layer you have to opt out of, turning off this one feature is a temporary fix, not an answer.
The real question is whether you want a recorder that keeps doing this at all. For a lot of podcasters, the answer is that they just want to record clean tracks and get on with their show, with no AI crew to manage, dismiss, or pay for. That’s the entire idea behind SureTake: a focused remote recorder that captures each participant on a separate, full-quality track and hands you the files, with no AI agents, no editing platform to buy into, and nothing inserted between you and the record button. (For how the metered AI-credit model works across these tools, we break it down in this article.)
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you turn off Riverside’s AI agents?
Partly. On the Business plan, an account owner or admin can disable AI features entirely in the account’s team permissions. On Pro and lower plans there’s no full off switch. Therefore, you can only minimize or ignore the agent panel, which users report still clutters the interface and reopens on its own.
Why are people complaining about Riverside Agents?
The main reasons are that the agents clutter the recording and editing interface with no full off switch on most plans, that early users find them clunky and buggy, that much of the work was already possible with existing features, and that many podcasters would rather Riverside fix core reliability than add more AI.
Do Riverside Agents use AI credits?
Yes, for some of what they do. The agents run on Riverside’s credit-metered AI system, so the parts that normally cost credits, like AI B-roll and translation, still draw them, while the parts that don’t, like Magic Clips, don’t. There’s no separate price for the agents, and Riverside markets them as efficient enough to “edit, clip and publish full episodes without hitting your AI usage limit,” but it hasn’t published a clear credit cost for the agents themselves. If that sounds confusing, it’s not just you. We break down how the credit model works in AI credits in podcast software.
What’s a good alternative if I just want to record without AI?
A focused recorder that doesn’t bundle an AI suite. SureTake records each participant locally on a separate, full-quality track and gives you the files to edit wherever you like, with no AI agents and no platform to buy into.
The Bottom Line
Riverside Agents got a polished launch and friendly press, but a real slice of Riverside’s paying users are pushing back. They say the agents clutter the tool, can’t be fully turned off below the Business plan, feel unfinished, and signal a direction a lot of podcasters didn’t ask for. If you like where it’s going, Riverside is leaning hard into AI and you’ll get more of it. If the launch made you want less AI in the way, not more, turning off one panel isn’t really the fix. Choosing a tool built to just record is.
Want to just record, with no AI crew to manage?
SureTake is a focused remote recorder, not an AI platform. It captures every participant locally on a separate, full-quality track and hands you the files, with no AI agents to dismiss and no editing suite to buy into. One hour a month, free, no credit card required, for as long as you want.