Approaching half of new podcasts appear to be AI slop.
Of the 10,871 new podcast feeds created in the past nine days, 4,243 of them, or 39 percent, have signs of being AI-generated, data from the Podcast Index cited by Bloomberg last week showed.
“It’s absurd,” Dave Jones, who runs the Podcast Index, said on his own show last week, per the outlet.
Podcasts, before the intrusion of AI, were already a sloppy medium. They’re designed to be listened to for hours on end while you zone out during chores, replacing your own scary thoughts with the babbling of someone else’s. Crucially, they’re inexpensive to produce and the bar for entry is pretty much zero.
All that makes the form perfect for being imitated by AI models. AI chatbots can effortlessly churn out lengthy scripts, and AI voice synthesizers can sound eerily humanlike, especially if you aren’t listening closely (as is wont to happen with a podcast).
It’s no wonder then that companies like Inception Point claimed last year to be churning out 3,000 episodes per week across 5,000 shows it made using AI, purportedly costing just $1 per episode. Its cofounder Jeanine Wright bragged to Bloomberg that the company now had more than 10,000 active shows, more than 2,500 of them made in the last three weeks.
A reporter for The Telegraph found that they were about as mind-numbingly vapid as you’d expect. One show was simply called “Lawn,” featuring a monotonous AI host that spoke mostly in cliches while telling little useful information about lawns.
The most interesting thing about the podcasts, in fact, was the AI’s frequent errors, such as casually referring to characters who were never mentioned before and never mentioned again, and even speaking in complete gibberish.
How many people are actually listening to this AI-generated dreck? It’s hard to imagine that listeners who stumble on an AI-generated show don’t either catch on to the charade and leave, or get bored and move on without ever realizing the host wasn’t human. Companies like Inception Point would probably prefer not to let us know. But at the sheer scale these episodes are being mass produced, there’s clear potential to make money from advertising and clicks — so who cares if they don’t attract a loyal fanbase?
Some podcast hosting services are cracking down. RSS.com doesn’t allow new shows to play its programmatic ads unless they subscribe to its service and have at least ten listeners in the past month, according to Bloomberg. If a podcast is determined to be “slop,” the ads are pulled, and the show either gets permanently demonetized or removed from the platform.
“Bootstrapped companies like ours are made of people, and the people who built RSS.com truly care about podcasting and real podcasters,” Alberto Betella, cofounder of RSS.com, told Bloomberg. “Deliberately leaving slop would hurt the ecosystem and also the reputation of our business. If we miss something, it’s a scale problem, not a policy one.”
The podcast sloplords disagree — and also really hate the word “slop.”
“The people still talking about slop are still making 6-7 jokes,” Wright, the Inception Point cofounder, told Bloomberg. “It’s still yesterday’s conversation.”
Okay, grandma.
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