An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week (thewrap.com) 57
fjo3 shares a report from TheWrap: There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That's thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk's assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour. Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers -- so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts.
Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts. "The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,â Wright told TheWrap. âoeYou can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them." At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach. "I think very quickly we get to a place where AI is a default way that content is made, not just across audio, but across television and film and commercials and imagery, and everything. And then we will disclose when things are not made with AI instead of that they were made with AI," Wright said. "But for now, we are perfectly happy leading the way."
Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts. "The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,â Wright told TheWrap. âoeYou can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them." At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach. "I think very quickly we get to a place where AI is a default way that content is made, not just across audio, but across television and film and commercials and imagery, and everything. And then we will disclose when things are not made with AI instead of that they were made with AI," Wright said. "But for now, we are perfectly happy leading the way."
quantity-over-quality (Score:3)
Re:quantity-over-quality (Score:4, Insightful)
"quantity-over-quality" sounds like the generic motto everything is following these days. *sigh*
Yes but you are overlooking a very important aspect. The war on education has been losing steadily, and the internet is too hard to thought police fully so we need some way to soften and rot brains just enough so they roll over and take it when we steamroll their savings, abuse their rights, and lock them into soulcrushing jobs while steeped in a fu got mine atmosphere.
The "loss of science" (Score:2)
Essentially, news collecting, reporting,and investigative journalism will be retired.
One of the losses will be factual science reporting by reports capable of reporting the story, investigating the claims made and producing more than a press release rehash of a easy to digest junk science paper.
But, what old is new or a blind alley off of new....
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/... [reaganlibrary.gov]
Ronald Reagan himself worked as a sports announcer for WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa during the 1930s. He would call Chicago Cubs g
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to thought police fully
I found a brain that's been "softened" - what do I win?
A zombie servant. Reprogram it to provide solely to you and leave only the most meager remains for it to survive. It takes maintenance to retain such embrace mental succor, so keep it addictive and distracting and nonstop. But remember, if you can’t control the spice you can’t control the mind cucked.
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I believe it was Joseph Stalin who said that quantity has its own quality (in regards to the T-34 tank).
Like the T-34, these enshittified tech products leave a trail of destroyed industries, collapsed societies, and scorched earth.
Re: quantity-over-quality (Score:2)
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Yep. Whole society doing enshittification.
On the other hand, I wonder whether that slop will get any listeners.
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What I wonder is whether it's any good. Admittedly, I don't wonder hard enough to listen to it, but then I generally (almost always) avoid podcasts.
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I guess that depends on who you are. There are people that endlessly watch soap-operas on TV. AI slop can supposedly reach that level. Maybe.
Re: quantity-over-quality (Score:1)
But how many...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers -- so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts
But how many of the episode downloaders are bots (like the voices in the podcasts)?
Pretty sure this is all inflated in preparation for some future IPO. We'll heard about a Theranos-like scandal in the near future.
Re: But how many...? (Score:2)
My thought too. It'd be hard to find a startup like this which didn't juice its numbers, even if they weren't already in the business of making fake stuff.
The real gift of todays AI just might be (Score:5, Insightful)
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to bury anything of value in immense piles of AI slop.
It's just an acceleration of what we were already doing to ourselves. Propaganda used to take effort. Now it can be automated and spewed out at such a prodigious rate that it'll be impossible to find anything of value in between all the chaff. And apparently we're too stupid as a species to stop and ask the valid questions now, so expect, if we're still around, in twenty years or so someone will go, "duh, uh, maybe we shouldn't a ought notta let dem machine dingies do all da tinkin' fer us?"
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New Icon Time (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think a hog in a trough would work.
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Start with the current icon, but render the light in a dirty yellow instead of blue, with a crack across the lens, and give the metal bezel some moderate rust and other damage.
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Can we please have a new story icon for AI slop?
A frame from R. Crumbs "Stoned Again" would fit.
Selling Summaries (Score:2)
trash is still trash (Score:3)
Quantity over quality (Score:2)
just means they know this thing is generating slop, saying things that are incorrect, probably biased (as many LLMs have bias in them), and likely spreading misinformation, or downright dangerous information.
And they just don't give a fuck.
Can someone stop the planet, I'd like to get off now.
Not making it profitable. Enshitifying it. (Score:3)
If companies like this continue to generate content, then every platform they touch will end up being killed off. It may not happen this year, but it will happen. Spotify, blogs, anything.
Grifters and scammers, the bane of all new tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Show of hands: How many here are old enough to remember when the CDROM first appeared?
For you young'ns out there: When the CDROM tech first made it into the hands of average folks, consumers were buying-up CDROM drives like crazy and installing them on their PCs. There were initially a few polished applications ready for people to buy and use like encyclopedias and a game called "Myst". It did not take terribly long for the vendors of good software to get on board and start making titles that took advantage of the then-considered-gigantic storage of the new media format, but in that window of time when the tech was new but there was very little GOOD content available. The scammers and fly-by-nighters popped up all over the place selling CDROM disks stuffed full of public domain stuff, text files anybody could freely get anywhere, piles of amateur computer art, MIDI music files.... ANYTHING the people making the disks could come up with to use at least a third of the space. They'd build a disk image, shoveled-up with junk, give the disk some interesting/promising title, mass produce it, and get it into stores with a moderate to low price that was just low enough that lots of people with their new CDROM drives would buy it just to have some uses for the new drives. We called these disks "Shovelware" disks.
Same thing here
YouTube is becoming a host to mountains of AI shovelware. They need to get a grip on this stuff and find a way to squash it before it convinces people that the platform is nothing but AI slop.
There's also another thing happening here which is of far greater concern:
With soul-less grifters using AI to pump out piles of videos in order to make money from click and views, much of the actual content is completely bogus...but it LOOKS shiny and "true" to many people. This is probably useful to the hyper-political and evil among us who do not care who they lie to as they try to build political narratives, BUT it's fundamentally dangerous to civilization to make a scheme in which a significant portion of the population cannot tell what is true and what is false. We were already getting a taste of this with the toxic political activists who have many people CONVINCED that Michele Obama is a man, or that Trump colluded with Russia, or Ted Cruise's dad helped kill JFK, or Chelsea Clinton is Web Hubble's kid, etc. Most of THAT stuff could be more easily debunked up to this point, but now people are pumping out AI videos that look (to average people) like valid news casts telling them garbage like [1] several Canadian provinces have become US states, [2] Clint Eastwood has had a religious conversion, [3] Elon Musk has developed a warp drive, etc. Put another way: It has escaped the political realm, and is no longer concentrated into the political cycle. Anyone who wanted to could go read the government docs on the whole collusion scam and see the reality, but there ARE no documents in government archives, with under-oath sworn testimony that apply to the stuff outside the political/governmental realm.
This is VERY bad, and it'll get worse. There's probably no geeky TECHNICAL fix for this (I know, this will not go over well on Slashdot...) As a society we're gonna have to find our way back to a place where most of us can agree on the reality that is, in fact, REAL, and can trust each others' WORD and hand shake. My grandparents' generation could do business with each other on a handshake. Everybody kept their word and worked hard to make sure they kept-up their end of any bargain. Even I can remember a time when our home had no locks on the doors, people could leave their keys in their cars, etc and nobody expected anything bad to happen. We've come a long way, and it isn't all good.
Fast, Cheap, Good (Score:2)
Put another way: It has escaped the political realm,
Actually it invaded the political realm. Phony information has been part of human existence for a long time along with gullible people who believe it because its more interesting than not believing it.
I think there is an entirely different take from this. That "AI slop" may be cheap and plentiful which would make it unlikely to create huge returns on investments. If it only costs $1 per episode to create a program, there is going to be an almost unlimited supply. And there is no reason to think AI won't be
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I'm old enough to remember the first CDROMs, but was only a tween / teenager at the time. I remember loving that CD slop, perhaps because I was too young to recognize its low value. I also remember hating Myst and being very upset for wasting what was at the time a lot of money on that game (I think around $60, at a time when $30-50 was more common for games). It was very slow pace with little to no action, so it probably didn't give my young brain enough dopamine hits.
Now that I have tweens of my own, I se
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My problem is not that there is slop now, it's that LLM AIs have been sold as intelligent when they aren't at all. There's even people posting on Slashdot that have tried saying AI is intelligent. Although, I haven't seen such posts of late.
Arguably, prompt engineering is a programming language. Just one less formal than usual. You only get a complex result with a complex list of instructions.
My point being there is now expectations of real intelligence. People are waiting for that servant robot to tur
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Shareware disks were sold in magazines because at the time was the faster way for a lot of people to get to ftp archives. They were useful for some people.
On the other hand AI slop doesn't have any utility for the people and fills the podcasting space with noise, basically.
Re: Grifters and scammers, the bane of all new tec (Score:2)
Add to that that the content was generally still stuff that real people spent real effort creating, the comparison to the flood of GenA
AI Slop / Spam (Score:1)
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The average AI Podcast I stumble across, if you check the comments you might see a few half-senile old people who believe it, most comments will just be saying "AI Voice lol" - people listen to that for a few minutes, realise it's an AI voice with a slideshow of images, and click off. They are usually put together by Russians. With Youtube's race to cut costs I won't be suprised if they announce a crackdown on "No ad revenue for AI voices" before long
Just Say No (Score:1)
Why? AI is anti human
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Wrong question. What is their market evaluation and where to buy stocks?
Now we know who drowned the (Score:3)
Inception "proudly leading the way."
Headline needs adjustment (Score:2)
"An AI Podcasting Machine Is Shitting Out 3,000 Episodes a Week"
There, fixed it.
I'll have my AI summarize it for me (Score:1)
so I can spend my mental cycles on something more better...
It's a podcast... (Score:2)
It's a damn podcast. 99.999% of them are garbage anyways, even if they are written by a "human". Or something with a physically human shaped body at least.
There isn't any true intelligence in a meatbag podcaster either.
Theft Engine Podcasting (Score:2)
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If they can't be bothered to write or read it, I can't be bothered to listen.
The end goal may not be to gain human listeners. It's more likely that they want to flood the zone so that other AI / LLM systems are parsing their podcasts and summarizing them as reality for end-users. It'll be bots feeding bots. And pretty soon, we'll need another layer of bots hovering over the current level of bots to parse out the gobbledygook nonsense being created by and summarized by the underbots. We're going to turn the entire internet into a giant cauldron of LLM spew, LLM summaries feeding othe
value is determined by scarcity ... (Score:2)
Good job, Jeanine Wright. More little points of shit that darken our world even more.
Narrow window of opportunity (Score:1)
Well, I checked it and it's pretty useless (Score:1)
It's just a bunch of AI voices reading text files. Nothing really useful with that yet.
I checked their catalog - it's a useless pile of slop [quietperiodplease.com].
Here's an example: A boring reading of a text about Havana Syndrome [spreaker.com].
I was expecting automatic clones in the like of Wolf 359 [wolf359.fm]... well we're not there yet.
Winner (Score:2)