Podcast industry under siege as AI bots flood airways with thousands of programs

By Nilesh Christopher Los Angeles Times Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts And the invasion has just begun Though their banter can be a bit banal the AI podcasters confidence and research are now arguably better than most of people s We ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human disclosed Alan Cowen chief executive of Hume AI a startup specializing in voice system We re seeing creators use it in all kinds of methods AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less industry insiders say but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded field is disrupting the industry Particular podcasters are pushing back requesting restrictions Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the million followers of his podcast Diary of a CEO On YouTube his clone narrates CEOs With Steven Bartlett which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson Erica Mandy the Redondo Beach California-based host of the daily news podcast called The Newsworthy let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice but then put the AI voice over that telling the audience from the very beginning I m sick Mandy announced Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners Specific appealed if she was OK One fan noted she should never do it again Preponderance weren t sure what to think A lot of people were like That was weird Mandy mentioned In podcasting a multitude of listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes canned ad reads sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by multiple as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts reported Megan Lazovick vice president of Edison Research a podcast research company Jason Saldanha of PRX a podcast arrangement that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein mentioned the tsunami of AI podcasts won t attract premium ad rates Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice conditions is not great he reported I m not interested in devaluing premium Still platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue A new generation of voice cloning companies a great number of with operations in California offers better emotion tone pacing and overall voice quality Hume AI which is based in New York but has a big research band in California raised million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its tool to generate audiobooks podcasts films voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning revealed company CEO Cowen Several are using the tech to carpet-bomb the area with content Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its podcast episodes accounting for of all podcasts published on the internet according to CEO Jeanine Wright The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics like local weather small sports teams gardening and other niche subjects Instead of a studio searching for a specific hit podcast idea it takes just to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just people listening That means preponderance of the stuff that we make we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do Wright declared One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue I am indeed AI-powered which means I ve got receipts older than your grandmother s jewelry box and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble No forgetting no forgiving and definitely no filter the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast We ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants noted Katie Brown chief content officer at Inception Point who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters Inception Point has built a roster of more than AI personalities whose characteristics voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences Its AI hosts include Clare Delish a cooking guidance expert and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown The tool also makes it easy to get podcasts up speedily Inception has discovered chosen success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news It uses AI utility to spot a trending personality and create two episodes complete with promo art and a trailer When Charlie Kirk was shot its AI this instant created two shows called Charlie Kirk Death and Charlie Kirk Manhunt as a part of the biography series We were able to create all of that content each with different angles pulling from different news sources and we were able to get that content up within an hour Wright revealed Speed is key when it comes to urgent news so its AI podcasts reached the top of particular charts Our content was coming up really dominating the list of what people were searching for she reported Across Apple and Spotify Inception Point podcasts have now garnered subscribers Los Angeles Times Visit at latimes com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC