It seems like it’s time to introduce a “human-hosted” badge for podcasts: Bloomberg reports that about 39% of new podcasts are now “probably” AI-generated, according to data from the Podcast Index that tracks the ecosystem.
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, as AI-hosted audio production is now incredibly simple and very fast. You can create your own AI podcast via a tool like NotebookLM in just a few minutes: introduce a few sources to work from and you get two AI hosts chatting through them. You can even chime in with your own comments.
The AI podcast revolution
As part of the AI podcast story, Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman spoke with Jeanine Wright, co-founder of Inception Point AI. Wright said their company now produces hundreds of shows per day with AI, currently runs more than 10,000 different shows, and is looking to increase that production over time.
Head over to Inception Point AI’s website and you’ll see that the company promises “the future of storytelling.” The blurb says “we don’t just create content, we create characters” (which sounds a lot like the meaningless wording AI would come up with), and that there is a list of AI “characters” ready and waiting to host shows.
This is all rather confusing, but as Inception Point AI points out, this technology is cheap, fast, and easy to scale. Not so long ago, a company promising “a full roster of AI talent” to produce podcasts might have come across as satire – but it’s now become a very serious (and growing) business.
Meanwhile, data entrepreneur Adam Levy launched an Epstein Files podcast earlier this year – themed around Jeffrey Epstein – which was AI-generated from millions of source documents. What’s more, the podcast was a great success, and exceeded the 2 million downloads mark.
This raises all kinds of questions about the ethics and accuracy of AI-generated results, whether it’s a text report, a video, or a podcast. How does the AI choose what to include and what to exclude from its source material? How do we connect the dots between different pieces of information? Can we trust what we hear?
Questions aside, the Epstein files show that these AI productions can be hugely successful – although, in this case, that may have more to do with the subject matter than whether or not the AI hosts are engaged. 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 subscribed to 14 different podcasts (including the TechRadar podcast) – and I’m behind on all of them as well. I put podcasts on when I’m driving somewhere, walking somewhere, falling asleep, and doing work around the house. They are my usual companions.
The podcasts I listen to cover tech, movies, TV, music, news, and general banter, and they’re quite varied in style and approach. What they all share, however, are presenters who are genuinely engaging and interesting to listen to, regardless of the topic being discussed.
Replacing these presenters with generic AI speech with all the edges smoothed out just doesn’t work. At all. Yes, these AI podcast hosts seem very real, but when you’ve listened to a few of them, you 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 quantities of real, human-spoken audio, which means everything — the script, the cadence, the pitch changes, the little “ums” and “ahs,” the hosts’ back-and-forths — sounds bland and like something that’s been built according to a template.
There is no life here, no personality, no tangents, no mistakes and no idiosyncrasy. It bears repeating (because it often seems to go unnoticed) that AI has never seen a movie, heard a song, held a real conversation, or thought beyond trying to organize words, sounds, and pixels into an algorithm-driven pattern.
AI content is increasingly being referred to as “slop,” which seems like a good term for it: mass-produced and of very little value. I’m going to stick to listening to real people having real conversations, regardless of how many AI-created podcasts come out. Now, don’t get me started on variable speed playback…
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds.
