AI Is Disrupting Everything. Why Not Podcasting?

At the IAB Podcast Upfront in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, scores of media executives, celebrities, audio creators, and adtech vendors graced the stage to extol the virtues of podcasting.

In a series of presentations interspersed with frenzied networking breaks, panelists hit all the classic talking points: the intimacy of the medium and the efficacy it affords for advertisers; the challenges and opportunities in measurement; the need to embrace a multipronged commercial strategy; and, of course, the embrace of video that’s begun to transform the entire medium.

One topic, however, was conspicuously absent: artificial intelligence. If the technology came up at all, it was as a tool to achieve backend efficiencies, such as creative optimization, audience targeting, and streamlined editing—not as a threat to the industry, nor in any way part of the actual process of creating the podcasts themselves.

As an unfortunate regular of the conference circuit, I can hardly overemphasize how unusual this is. Nearly every media industry event I attend immediately devolves into a parlor game of AI bingo, with the audience and panelists all waiting patiently for the subject to arise and subsume the rest of the conversation. In every other part of publishing, there is no more pressing subject matter and no greater object of hyperfixation than AI.

To compound the oddity, news of a controversial startup in the audio space has recently worked the industry into a lather. Called Inception Point AI, the company has made headlines by championing a strategy predicated on using AI-generated personalities to create podcasts, with the broader goal of turning the personalities into influencers.

The Hollywood Reporter article introducing the startup—“5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode”—set off a firestorm of indignation, with thought leaders and executives in the audio industry decrying the output as “slop.” 

Set against the backdrop of this uproar, the exclusion of AI from any of the Upfront programming was particularly baffling. Clearly the barbarians are at the gates. Just as ChatGPT transformed text-based production when it was introduced two years ago, the debut of Inception Point, and the launch this week of both Meta’s and OpenAI’s AI-generated social video feeds, feels like an inflection point. 

‘Carbon-based’ creators

Just like its predecessor, the mission and methodology of Inception Point have been roundly criticized. Several audio executives I spoke with insisted that the intrusion of AI into the world of podcast creation would be limited to the fringes, if at all.

Their arguments border on the sentimental. If you’ve ever spoken with anyone involved in professional podcasting, the craft can be discussed with the kind of reverence that most people reserve for houses of worship. The words authenticity, connection, intimacy, and even magic come up frequently. It can get very woo-woo.

And yet, do you have a favorite podcast? As treacly as it sounds, the medium does yield a sense of intimacy unlike any other, one often rooted in a sense of connection that the listener has with the host. As a result, its practitioners are confident—adamant, almost—that it will be largely spared from the ravages of AI. 

“It’s obvious that creators need to be carbon-based organisms,” said Greg Glenday, CEO of the podcast company Acast. “We use AI around the edges, but our pitch to advertisers is authenticity. That is our moat and our five-year plan.”

Others echoed the sentiment that AI poses less of a threat to podcast hosts than it does to writers or even video creators. 

“As long as podcasting remains something people think of as an authentic experience,” said Matt Shapo, the director of digital audio and video at the IAB, “I’m not sure we’ll ever have the same level of disruption when it comes to content production.”

There are exceptions, of course. 

Certain genres of podcast are likely to be outsourced to AI, the same way commodity text content has been replaced by ChatGPT. Podcasts recapping sports games, detailing the weather, or offering a synopsis of a news article are already popular use cases for the technology. In these cases, according to Glenday, listeners have a connection to the content, not the creator. 

“Commodity podcasting—news, weather, daily rundowns—could be replaced,” said Alison Tucker, an associate director of audio investment at Omnicom Media Group. “But basically everything else? That’s much harder.”

The divide is reflective of a wider trend reshaping digital media. As AI dramatically reduces the effort required to create generic content, publishers and consumers are increasingly gravitating toward creator-led content, where personality can distinguish it from the deluge of information now inundating the web.

Robot callers

Still, the confidence among podcasters is disorienting, as AI has engendered existential dread into nearly every other sector of the economy. 

That optimism—misplaced or otherwise—is also exactly where Inception Point sees its opportunity, according to CEO and cofounder Jeanine Wright. 

The idea for the company came from the pandemic, when cofounder William Corbin created a popular podcast, called Covid 411, simply by reading the daily CDC update into a mic. The series spurred Corbin to think about other ways to make timely content that people want with low production costs, Wright said. 

While the ambitions of the startup are broader than podcasts, the company started with the medium because the technology surrounding synthetic audio is already advanced enough that it’s difficult to tell the difference between a real and artificial voice. 

By combining that capability with timely subject matter, the company aims to produce quick, low-lift audio products that only need to find a small audience to recoup their minimal costs. Already, Inception Point has more than 4,000 of these AI-generated shows, publishing thousands of episodes a week on platforms including iHeartMedia’s Spreaker. (Some of the flash-published series include biographies of zeitgeist subjects including Austin Butler, Ozzy Osborne, and Charlie Kirk.) 

The strategy positions the company specifically for the niche of commodity audio content that podcast executives have conceded is already susceptible to bot-sourcing. The larger question is whether audiences will embrace its entertainment output, which the company plans to expand to feature a cast of AI-generated personalities in conversation with one another, discussing real and fictional subjects through the filters of their lab-designed personalities. 

“Most of the pushback is because people have not stayed on the cutting-edge of AI development,” Wright said. “If people say that AI creators will never be able to get to the emotionality of a human creator, I think they don’t understand the capabilities of the tools today and where they will be in the future.”

That such a product could ever take off admittedly feels like a stretch. And yet, by now I am loath to bet against the steady advance of AI into every crevice of creative output. 

So who is right: the podcast professionals betting on their moat of authenticity, or the Hollywood startup farming out its editorial to bots?