The Sound of Slop Is Coming

Everyone has a podcast these days, even people who aren’t actually people. The Hollywood Reporter recently ran a profile on Inception Point AI, a company that’s in the business of flooding the podcasting landscape with so much AI-generated slop that you simply cannot avoid it, a strategy the company at least seems to believe is working.

If you haven’t heard of Inception Point AI, you aren’t alone—the company has been largely working in stealth mode until recently. But if you search regularly for new podcasts to listen to, you’ve perhaps come across some of their products. Per THR, Inception Point runs the Quiet Please Podcast Network, which has more than 5,000 shows on its platform. If you pop over to the company’s website, you’ll spot a couple of ripped-from-the-headlines shows, like “Diddy Verdict,” a three-episode series covering the trial of Sean Combs, or “Alligator Alcatraz,” which covers the immigrant detention center built in Florida’s Everglades. Scroll and you’ll see a bunch of podcasts that are focused on specific topics: Skiing, bunkers, menopause, etc. It feels like an SEO play in the podcast space, just flood the zone of commonly searched topics and try to come up at the top of the list.

What you won’t see is any disclosure that these are AI-generated shows—not on the website, not in the podcast descriptions, and not in the audio itself (at least in the episodes we listened to—according to THR, the company has started adding disclosures at the top of episodes that the hosts are AI). It kind of seems like the company doesn’t like its audience, to the extent it has one, will care all that much. “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,” CEO Jeanine Wright told THR.

“Good” is pretty subjective here. There are lots of podcasts, made by humans, that offer listeners original reporting, unique insight, and analysis, or at least interesting voices. AI-generated podcasts can basically only offer a facsimile of that, cribbing the works of others to produce something vaguely passable.

But what AI can do that humans can’t is match AI’s churn. It seems like Inception Point believes that to be their leg up in the podcasting space. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the company is producing about 3,000 new episodes a week, which cost about $1 per episode and about one hour to go from inception to publication for public listening. If that seems like a waste of a dollar, the math for the company is pretty simple. According to THR, with programmatic advertising attached to each upload the company makes, it only requires about 20 listeners for an episode to turn a profit.

The company claims to have already generated about 10 million downloads since September 2023, which frankly is not that much considering the sheer volume of shows and episodes it is producing, but it’s apparently enough for the company to keep expanding. The company has generated about 50 AI personalities that serve as hosts, and it’s thinking of ways to expand their functionality, considering things like having “chats” with listeners or having them sing “Happy Birthday” to them, like Cameo but for completely fabricated “celebrities.”

“We believe that in the near future, half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” Wright told THR, with clear disinterest in thinking whether that’s a thing that should happen or is something that anyone wants.