Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.<\/p>\n
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters\u2019 confidence and research are now arguably better than most people\u2019s. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,\u201d said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.\u201d <\/p>\n
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.<\/p>\n
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots. <\/p>\n
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast \u201cDiary of a CEO.\u201d On YouTube, his clone narrates \u201c100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,\u201d<\/a> which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett\u2019s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. <\/p>\n Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called \u201cThe Newsworthy,\u201d let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out. <\/p>\n She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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\u2019m sick,\u201d Mandy said. <\/p>\n Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews. <\/p>\n Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren\u2019t sure what to think. <\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people were like, \u2018That was weird,\u2019\u201d Mandy said. <\/p>\n In podcasting, many 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.<\/p>\n Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company. <\/p>\n Jason \u2060Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won\u2019t attract premium ad rates. <\/p>\n \u201cAdding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in devaluing premium.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced<\/a> features<\/a> 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, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality. <\/p>\n Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d said company CEO Cowen.<\/p>\n Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.<\/p>\n Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Instead of a studio searching for a specific \u201chit\u201d podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.<\/p>\n \u201cThat means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,\u201d Wright said. <\/p>\n One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele<\/a>, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. \u201cI am indeed AI-powered \u2014 which means I\u2019ve got receipts older than your grandmother\u2019s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,\u201d the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,\u201d said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters. <\/p>\n Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 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.<\/a><\/p>\n The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.<\/p>\n When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called \u201cCharlie Kirk Death\u201d<\/a> and \u201cCharlie Kirk Manhunt\u201d<\/a> as a part of the biography series. <\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Wright said. <\/p>\n Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts. <\/p>\n \u201cOur content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.<\/p>\n