Huh?

This is a quote from the CEO of a new podcast company in a piece in the Hollywood Reporter. Jeanine Wright was formerly Chief Operating Officer at Wondery and is now heading up Inception Point AI which basically plans to flood the market with AI generated podcasts which might be produced for less than $1 an episode. The company already has more than 5,000 podcast shows producing as many as 3,000 episodes a week. According to their website, they can “Scale content infinitely” whatever that means.

The company does not seem to like the term “AI Slop“, but it’s hard to think what they can possibly be doing aside from producing thousands of hours of AI Slop.

“I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy Luddites. Because there’s a lot of really good stuff out there” – Wright

Really? That’s a little insulting.

At the simplest level, the Hollywood Report piece says that they produce localised weather report podcasts and biographies, with “higher levels” seeing them produce subject area podcasts presented by one of their 50 or so AI “personalities.”

The business model seems to be, produce an audio episode of a podcast on just about anything at incredibly low cost. Get a small number of people to listen. Monetise that handful of listens, and you’re already in profit, because your costs are so low.

Quite why anyone would want to listen to this stuff is another question. If I want localised weather in audio form, basically any weather provider can already do that. (It’s even a hidden feature inside the BBC Weather app). Frankly, the screen-reader built into your laptop or phone can do the job, pointed at your weather site of choice.

The content team, led by Katie Brown, a former lifestyle television host and home goods expert, gives each podcast a title, creates an outline of the podcast, with the content filled out by AI, and assigns it one of the personalities as a host. Other team members do a final check and add in music and sound. The shows are also spot-checked periodically. 

Cool.

So the podcast might be full of garbage – or “hallucinations”?

This form of monetisation makes chumbox advertising look highbrow.

But it’d be unfair to criticise a podcast company without at least sampling their output. I went to Apple Podcasts and looked at the Quiet. Please network on that site.

The show artwork looks like they put nearly as much effort into it as they do making the audio. Just about everything has some kind of AI-generated painterly vibe to it, with Impact often being the typeface of choice.

Quite how Apple orders their podcasts is not clear to me, but perhaps in terms of popularity?

The first title in the list is a podcast called Taylor Swifts Love Life [sic]. Apple says it’s updated weekly, but curiously, the most recent episode was actually on March 7, the and there was only one other 2025 episode. I say “curiously” because there has been some big Taylor Swift news about her love life in the last week or so, and I’d have thought Inception Point AI would have wanted to jump on it.

I listened to some of the most recent episode, and heard a crypto ad, and localised UK Shopify ad. Then we got into the “meat” of the podcast. A completely un-engaging voice then basically gave us an audio generated version of the Wikipedia entries for Travis Kelce, and basically summarised relevant bits of the most recent episode of the Kelce brothers’ podcast. Honestly, it sounds someone gave an AI a few Mailonline and NY Post story links, and said “Summarise them and generate a 20 minute podcast.”

Then I turned to something seemingly a bit more upmarket. Somehow Inception Point AI produces a daily podcast on the James Webb Space Telescope!

Of course, it’s enormously helpful that NASA itself publishes a plentiful feed of articles about the science being done with the telescope. And largely speaking, anyone can reuse the amazing imagery and videos that they produce. But the podcast is awful.

“What is especially [LONG PAUSE FOR NO REASON] noteworthy here is….”

“The tallest spire visible in Webb’s shot stretches over five and four [PAUSE] tenths light-years…” (Note, they actually mean 5.4 light-years.)

At least the AI speaker in this instance is a bit more upbeat. But who is listening to this junk? You could just as easily go visit the NASA site and read it yourself. Or if you have some kind of visual impairment, just use a screen reader. It’ll do a better job, and you won’t have to hear any crypto ads.

I’m not sure I want to hear an AI’s take on Israel, Palestine, Gaza – Conflict+War, but I’d note that this “daily” podcast hasn’t had a new episode since March 2024. And even, Donald Trumps USA [sic] seems to have stopped producing episodes in January 2024.

Sidenote: does nobody at Inception Point AI understand when to use possessive apostrophes?

Be Happy – How to get and stay Happy seemed to only manage three episodes lasting a combined 10 minutes back in 2023. But Ozempic Weightloss Unlocked seems to be publishing four minute episodes every few days.

Laurel and Hardy Old Time Radio Show: There is Gonna be a Fight (that’s really the title) is a curious one. This is not AI generated. Instead, the episode I listened to seemed to be an audio excerpt of the slapstick duo’s 1938 film Block-Heads which, as far as I’m aware, is very much still under copyright. There are only nine episodes, and they stopped in 2023.

I can only really think the business model here is a lure people in, get them to hear a couple of ads, and only then discover that the audio they’re getting is basically AI generated garbage. But by the time they bail out, they’ve heard a couple of ads and if they’re getting $10 cpm, and serving two ads, they only need 50 people to make $1 and therefore make some money.

We can only hope that search algorithms will surface podcasts that other people are actually listening to. Because from YouTube videos to Kindle books to podcasts, AI slop is going to be everywhere, and it’s going require search functionality to weed this garbage out of search results.

And no, I still have no idea what “half the people on the planet will be AI” actually means.

I saw this story via a snippet published by David Pierce at The Verge which he called The Bleakest Possible Podcasting Future.