It seems like it's time to introduce a “human-hosted” badge for podcasts: Bloomberg reports that around 39% of new podcasts are now “probably” generated by AI, according to data from the Podcast Index that tracks the ecosystem.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise, as producing AI-hosted audio is now incredibly simple and very fast. You can create your own AI podcast through a tool like NotebookLM in just a few minutes: enter a few sources to work with and you'll get two AI hosts chatting through them. You can even intervene with your own comments.
The AI Podcast Revolution
As part of the article on AI podcasts, Bloomberg's Ashley Carman spoke with Jeanine Wright, co-founder of Inception Point AI. Wright said his company now produces hundreds of programs a day with AI, currently manages more than 10,000 different programs, and is looking to increase that production over time.
Head to Inception Point AI's website and you'll see that the company promises “the future of storytelling.” The sales blurb says “we don't just create content, we create characters” (which sounds a lot like the empty phrase that AI would come up with), and that there is a list of AI “characters” ready and waiting to host shows.
It's all pretty baffling, but as Inception Point AI points out, this technology is cheap, fast, and easy to scale. Not long ago, a company promising “a full range of AI talent” to produce podcasts would have seemed like satire, but now it's become a very serious (and growing) business.
Meanwhile, data entrepreneur Adam Levy launched an Epstein Files podcast earlier this year, on the subject of Jeffrey Epstein, which was generated by AI from millions of source documents. What's more, the podcast was a huge success and surpassed the 2 million mark in terms of downloads.
This raises all sorts of questions about the ethics and accuracy of AI-generated results, whether it's a text report, video, or podcast. How does the AI choose what to include and what to omit from its source material? How do you connect the dots between different pieces of information? Can we trust what we are hearing?
Questions aside, Epstein Files shows that these AI productions can be wildly successful, although perhaps in this case it has more to do with the subject matter than with how attractive or not the AI presenters are. It doesn't look like AI podcasts are going away anytime soon.
Stay away from 'podslop'
I'm an avid podcast listener, via the excellent Pocket Casts app, and I'm currently signed up for 14 different podcasts (including the TechRadar podcast), and I'm behind on all of them, too. I put on podcasts when I'm driving somewhere, walking somewhere, falling asleep, and doing chores around the house. They are my usual companions.
The podcasts I listen to cover technology, movies, television, music, current events and general pranks, and are quite varied in terms of style and approach. One thing they all share, however, are presenters who are genuinely engaging and interesting to listen to, no matter what topic is being covered.
Replacing those presenters with generic AI speeches with all edges smoothed simply doesn't work. At all. Yes, these AI podcast hosts sound very real, but when you listen to some of them, you can recognize the telltale signs of AI, just like you do when you look at AI images or read AI-generated text.
These AI podcasts are produced by averaging large amounts of real, human-spoken audio, which means that everything—the script, the cadence, the pitch shifts, the little “ums” and “ahs,” the back-and-forth of the hosts—feels bland and templated.
There is no life here, no personality, no tangents, no errors, no idiosyncrasies. It's worth reiterating (as it often seems to be overlooked) that AI has never watched a movie, listened to a song, had a real conversation, or thought about anything beyond trying to arrange words, sounds, and pixels into an algorithm-driven pattern.
AI content is increasingly referred to as “garbage,” which seems like a good term to describe it: mass-produced and of very little value. I'm going to continue listening to real people having real conversations, no matter how many AI-created podcasts are published. Now, don't get me started on variable speed playback…
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