Quoting from the CEO
I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites
We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI
Half the people on the planet will be AI
These guys really need to talk to tape recorder for a few minutes and play it back. This is a new level of stupid.
Not stupid necessarily, but profoundly misanthropic.
I have never talked to or read from an AI shill who did not have a severely depressing view on humanity, with arguments being a variation of “oh yeah, LLMs are just parrots but so are we/so are most people”, and “comprehension is just pattern matching anyways”.
Which is really darkly hilarious in a way, because if you think of older, now clichéed, sci fi stories, then treating a machine capable of feelings and comprehension as a human rather than a tool is the human thing to do. But these people are so backwards that
- They rob us of humanity to put us on the same level as AI.
- They still treat the LLMs (which should now be human) as tools and therefore deny them of humanity too.
comprehension is just pattern matching anyways
Anyone who claims to know what intelligence actually is at a fundamental level must possess a very artificial kind of intelligence themselves.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the people who call their political opponents “NPCs” and fantasize about replacing women with android sexbots have become AI shills (or AI doomers) in this year of our Lord 2025.
Even if they’re correct, how does that justify the insane expenditure of resources used to make a different parrot?
5,000 Shows, 3,000 Episodes a Week, 0 Listeners
Leaving aside the lazy genAI approach to spewing out content: text-to-speech just ain’t that good.
The startup is currently bootstrapped, and employees are not yet salaried, but the company will soon seek outside funding.
If they’re producing over 3,000 episodes a week, this is quantity over quality, which is definitionally slop.
Did you see the part where they pick topics that are trending on google via AI? So they will make a thousand podcasts about whale facts that are all wrong because they think it will fet more clicks?
I actually can’t believe companies are cool with hosting and storing all this garbage on their servers that they complain are costing them so much money these days to make $5 for a group like this.
Yup, it’s a preposterous business model.
They’re churning out a thousand different “podcasts” in the hopes that maybe 20 people will listen to 1, and that 1 will get new episodes?
They’re viewing podcasts as a business + marketing exercise, which ignores the whole reason that podcasts became popular in the first place; unique creators making unique works as a labour of love.
This could also be SEO’d to shit if targeted. It would end up all being about products and scams.
All the while jacking up my electric and water bill to support these data centers use. Need legislation to push the burden on these companies and not the general public, especially people like me who don’t use or support this shit.
If they marketed it as “Hallucinating about whales for an hour” it might get genuine interest.
Is it ironic that the exec refers to her critics as “lazy”?
So they are using AI to produce content that will probably be exclusively consumed by AI that tries to learn how to make content.
Basically, a complete shit eating cycle that only has real food once at the beginning.
So, an “AI Centipede” type situation.
This is already happening on YouTube with audiobooks channels where everything is ai generated. The Stories are terrible with plot holes and nonsense stories, narration boring and no personality. It’s just spam at this point.
I have my eyes on 3 channels like that, each with slightly different Mo’s. But one channel posts 30 5 minute videos every day. 2k subscribers, 9k videos. Isn’t that going to become a problem for YouTube?
I don’t think so. I guess the overall time spend on YouTube won’t increase, it will just shift from some channels to others.
I mean from a storage and upload burden. Nobody is watching them (this generation that is being uploaded right now) but each AI is uploading 10x or 100x what a human does and nobodies watching it…
Podcast topics are selected with the help of AI, based on Google and social media trends, and then the team may launch five different versions of the show with different titles to see what performs the best. The podcasts are often titled after simple SEO search terms, such as Whales, so that they’re discoverable. The shows that do stick can then be replicated and scaled.
“We might make a pollen podcast that maybe only 50 people listen to, but I’m already at unit profitability on that, and so then maybe I can make 500 pollen report podcasts,” Wright said.
This is the dumbest shit i have ever heard. And will just mean an unending noise of fake poscasts all on single topics of the minute that provide nothing of real value.
Yup i am never wanted podcasts and im staying far away from most the Internet these days. Its dead and artificially reanimated.Okay, so I’m going to jump in and defend podcasts, because I think they’re an exception to the Dead Internet Theory.
There is (ironically, I know) a podcast I really liked on the topic:
The quick summary is, while some kinds of social media have been captured by big centralized companies, centralized, and enshittified - like microblogging with X, or videos with YouTube and TikTok - podcasting hasn’t.
Because podcasting is distributed via RSS, a free open source protocol, anyone can create and distribute a podcast and there are hundreds of podcast apps to listen with.
There’s no centralized location where you have to go to listen to podcasts - you search for podcasts on whatever app you like and you follow the podcasts you want to listen to. Apple Podcasts and Spotify have big databases of podcasts, but you don’t have to use either of them, as long as somebody has an RSS feed you can subscribe directly to their podcast without going through a gatekeeping platform of any kind.
This makes it really difficult to enshittify the podcastosphere with a ton of AI slop, because people follow the podcasts they want to follow, they don’t rely on an algorithm to feed them new podcasts the way TikTok feeds them new videos, and if their podcast app tries to promote content they don’t want, they can just switch apps.
So while this idea is shitty and a podcastosphere dominated by AI would suck I really don’t expect it to get much traction.
While I agree at the usefulness of podcasts. The vast majority of people find podcasts through engagement algorithms on Spotify and other platforms, so they are certainly beholden to being fed slop content the same way other media does.
Well, that’s depressing.
They do, but there are huge open directories available too.
If AI agents are “people” that’s fantastic news. That means their employers can pay income (output?) taxes and fund UBI for us flesh and bloods.
half the people on the planet
e.g. “not to worry advertisers! These aren’t simple bots we are using to inflate our numbers so you pay us. These are AI!”
This is a terrible idea and the people involved should be banished to the void beyond the stars. They can listen to their “podcasts” there.
Yeah I like cosmic punishment. Just send them to space. They can even take some food and water with them, as a sort of last rites.
Coool. My roomba will have something to listen to while i’m at work.
AI is such a fckng cult man…
Ok but “fucking cult” does not sound that bad to me tbh…
people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites
…
3,000 episodes a week
Can someone make this make sense?
But look at how productive he is compared to the rest of us!
Dont see us producing a month worth of random noise sounds Per week. We are Practically amish in comparison
3k episodes a week split over 5k podcasts.
Eg, In one week, 1 episode for “cooking with robots”, one for “excersize with robots” etc
I was being sarcastic because it seems like slop.
Only 3000 episodes a week? I can make chatgtp to generate audio practically non stop on any topic I would be interested in. Why would I subscribe to a pre-rendered podcast?
wtf why would anyone want this
That’s the neat part; they don’t!
yea this isn’t a news article, its an advertisement. Its an ad directed at venture capitalists with money to burn, specifically. Its not for you or me. They want someone to invest a bunch of money, then they take that money and spend it and declare bankrupcty of the company but they pay themselves off first. The ownerof hollywood reporter is probably invested already.
