Indie Podcasters Shouldn't Worry About AI Podcasts

We're giving our thoughts on this week's big story: a company called Inception Point AI has been flooding the podcasting ecosystem with an astonishing 3,000 AI-generated episodes weekly! 

But should podcasters panic? Probably not. Real podcasters offer something machines cannot: personal stories, authentic connections, and the beautiful imperfections that make content relatable and human. 

Contact Buzzcast

• Send us a text message
• Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods

Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Transcript

Jordan: 0:00

So one of the biggest stories this week has been the company called Inception Point AI, who is producing about 3,000 podcast episodes per week using entirely AI, and I think that this is a story that I've seen swirling around everywhere. Everyone has really strong opinions on it If you're not familiar. Basically they have 5,000 podcasts. They've made like 160,000 episodes so far just using AI, and 3,000 podcasts a week is pretty concerning for a lot of people because they're using Spreaker and publishing all these episodes with programmatic ads on them. To me it reminds me of like a Pixar film in which the villain is like what we we're not breaking any rules.

Kevin: 0:44

We're doing nothing wrong Like what is our anyway.

Jordan: 0:47

And then like behind them they're like turning a knob that's going to like slowly ooze toxic goo into the internet and like destroy the one true thing we love.

Kevin: 0:55

Did you guys ever watch the Phineas and Ferb stuff?

Jordan: 0:58

No, what's this?

Kevin: 1:00

Oh, the bad guy from Phineas and Ferb was hilarious. Every episode he would make you know some sort of destruction machine that would do something and he would always call's it like the inator, and so this would be like the podcastinator.

Jordan: 1:09

Yes! That's exactly it. I was just reading this story and I was just like man, I've seen this film before, I know this one. This is Mitchells vs the Machines, this is Big Hero 6. There's like the corporate villain just taking the one last cent of like podcasting revenue and putting it in their pocket and leaving behind a wake of destruction, and I think that that is the way that a lot of podcasters are viewing this story. But I don't know, I think that we all kind of have a different view of this.

Alban: 1:40

I mean, I've seen this story before and it was like every website on Google three years ago.

Alban: 1:46

Oh, gpt came out and people were like, hey, there's all this content marketing.

Alban: 1:51

That's been around forever and it works really well for businesses. But you know, we could just like scrape every page and then write our own version and spin up 10,000 web pages a day and claim all these Google rankings. And they were right for like a year and then it all imploded once Google goes oh wait, this experience actually really stinks because it all reads the same, it's poorly written, it doesn't really have a unique perspective, there's no authority behind it, and eventually all the rankings kind of went to the people who really were doing firsthand knowledge what they're writing about, that actually done research, that put some effort in person behind it, and we've seen that on our blog. We didn't get hit as hard as others might have, but there was this huge wave and everyone in content marketing was freaking out and now I think, at least in my opinion, it's swung all the way back to if you're a real person, proving you're a real person, putting real person authenticity behind it, you actually do quite a bit better.

Kevin: 2:52

I think the platforms that are algorithmically driven are definitely more susceptible to stuff like this and podcasting as a whole. It really is not. There is some percentage of the podcast listening world out there that probably discovers a podcast through a search of some sort, whether that happens on Google or Apple Podcasts or Spotify. But on the whole the majority of podcasts come through recommendations or through picking up the podcast of like somebody who you follow on social or something. So there are other more like real world screening processes that kind of happen before you launch into listening to a podcast.

Jordan: 3:28

Yeah.

Kevin: 3:29

So I think that speaks to why a company like this has to do the volume that they're cranking out in order to get any amount of traction at all like to make it worthwhile. You can't just be putting out a hundred podcast episodes a week. You have to be doing thousands, because all of these shows are probably doing a very low volume overall and people like. The churn I would imagine on this type of content is relatively high Like 100% you listen to one episode.

Jordan: 3:57

Yeah.

Alban: 3:57

The example I think the CEO gave was a pollen podcast. He's like we could do a whole podcast about pollen and if only 50 people listen. We're positive on the numbers and I'm like, yeah, but anybody who's willing to listen to a pollen podcast is going to identify this sounds totally fake and bogus. In one or two episodes You're absolutely right.

Kevin: 4:16

If you listen to a pollen podcast like, you are nuanced, right, you're niched down, and so I think it's possible that you stumble upon one of these podcast episodes, because there might not be a lot of people in your life who are, I don't know, you know, sharing. Oh, here's the latest, greatest pollen podcast that I stumbled upon. But for somebody who's, like, affected with a pollen allergy or something, they might be searching, right, they're going to go to podcast search engines, they're going to search for this stuff. They're going to find possibly some of this AI generated content, but I just don't think it has any staying power. Like they're probably going to screen it. They're going to listen to a few minutes, download an episode or two and be like that's not exactly what I'm looking for.

Kevin: 4:55

I'm not looking for AI generated content. That's basically taking all the information that I could already find just by doing a Google search or doing my own chat, gpt search and finding this information. I want to find, you know, personal experiences. I want to hear real life stories of people who have connected with a similar affliction that I have and how they're dealing with it, or the treatments that they've gone through and what worked and what didn't. That only comes through personal experience and story. Now it's possible that some of that gets infused into these stories, because the AI bots will go and find blog posts and stuff, and so I do think you could probably fool them for a little while, but I just don't think it's going to have any staying power long-term.

Jordan: 5:28

Yeah, I was looking at one of the podcasts ratings and reviews and it was a. It was a podcast about knitting and one of the reviews was one star and they said at one point in the episode they were giving instructions on how to do a certain knit and the instructions were incorrect and they would actually turn into a jumbled mess and they're like. So I realized this wasn't actually a good podcast for this and I think that's the thing is. There's just going to be these red flags throughout each episode where people go wait a second. That doesn't add up and, along with what you were saying about, like the personal stories and stuff like that, I think that's part of what independent podcasters have as staying power against AI. Podcasts are not going to have super fans because they're not going to make these connections, they're not going to have this relationship building ability that real podcasters have.

Alban: 6:22

Yeah, have you ever gone on like YouTube and seen YouTube shorts that are like 30 second clips of TV shows or movies?

Jordan: 6:29

Yes.

Alban: 6:30

Yeah, and they reverse the image and then they have a scroll across it so it doesn't get picked up by the detection algorithm and, like you see like a 30 second clip, even if it's a movie that like I know and I'm like, oh, what a good scene, like I've watched all of them before but I've never been like that creator has something.

Jordan: 6:48

Yeah.

Alban: 6:49

You know you never look down and subscribe to the channel and gone. I want to have an ongoing relationship with this channel that rips clips from movies and post them, and the people that I connect with there's a level of authenticity. They're risking something, they get stuff wrong sometimes and it's human. And the more human and authentic it can be, the more I want to connect to it.

Alban: 7:13

The internet when we first got on, I think we all really wanted authority. You know, if you talk to people about pollen, you may only know one or two people who knew anything about pollen. So you wanted some connection to other people who dealt with your allergy. And then we wanted to find the authority, like who really knows who's doing pollen research online? They used to be often some lab in Connecticut or something and now I can find them online. So we could find authority.

Alban: 7:38

But now I think we're kind of shifting way back into authenticity, where we go to Reddit and we're like I just want to talk to other people. Even if it's kind of a jumbled forum, at least it's real people. It seems like it's real people and podcasts we are all everyone who's listening to this and everyone's doing a show. You're all the way. On the authenticity side, it's your voice. It's you making mistakes. Kevin and I were talking about something right before this, that 50-50 chance what I was telling him was fake or not even true. We're making the mistakes and I don't really want to listen to a podcast that is machine curated and isn't trying to develop some type of human relationship. It just feels totally fake and, I don't know, fabricated, just kind of empty.

Jordan: 8:23

Yeah Well, and additionally, you know we were talking about how this feels like a children's villain origin story sort of thing. It's one of those things where it's just so ridiculous that I don't see them succeeding. I don't see that there's a world in which Spreaker is going to be like yeah okay, you guys can have all the programmatic advertising dollars, for you know, like any of the podcast platforms are going to allow this to continue. I mean, even YouTube has been taking actions against what they consider to be like AI slop, and so I think it's only a matter of time before this kind of stuff gets taken down as well.

Alban: 8:58

Well, it's because it's preying on the assumption that a podcast is made by a person, and it's a person who has real experiences and has done some research and is trying to do a good job.

Alban: 9:10

Yeah, and so when you see a podcast and it's on your topic, you go, oh, thank the Lord, like somebody else is out there and I'm out to connect and I'm out to learn. And then they're like, oh, if you want to knit, like this. And then you were like, wait a second, this makes no sense. And it's the same like voice that's on every one of those dumb Instagram real videos.

Alban: 9:30

You go oh, it's another one. Yep, all one-star reviews. Okay, I got suckered in. People aren't going to get suckered in again the third and fourth time because they're going to go. When I look for a podcast, if it's perfectly on the point that I'm looking for, I'm going to go start checking those reviews and go okay, a bunch of one-star that say, yeah, this was AI generated. I think we're just going to adapt to it, in the same way we had to adapt to spam email or a bunch of junk on the internet.

Jordan: 9:58

Text messages yeah.

Kevin: 10:00

Yeah, I think I agree with both of you guys.

Kevin: 10:02

It's also maybe to try to wrap it up in an optimistic note. I think the more low quality content that enters into whatever creative space that you're operating in and in this case, podcasting the better opportunity you have as a creator to stand out, to differentiate yourself and in this case it might not be too hard because all you have to do is just be you, be authentic, do the best version of the show that you can and, as we talked about in the like the super fans episode, give your audience a way to connect with you, to share some level of the person behind the podcast that you're doing again with boundaries and with safety in mind, and all that kind of stuff. But I do think the more like low quality stuff that enters into creative space, it gives the real people who have heart and passion and desire to create something good, it gives you more of an opportunity to stand out and elevate what you're bringing to the space. If podcasting doesn't have low quality content, then the bar becomes high, right, like you're always competing against the top podcasters.

Jordan: 10:57

Yeah.

Kevin: 10:58

And so in some way it's good to have like a large swath of quality of content because you get to differentiate yourself in that space. So hopefully somebody who's looking for that pollen podcast and they stumble upon yours and you're new and you're still learning the game, you know what. Maybe they latch on because they feel like this is a real person and they don't have all the answers their microphone technique might be a little bit shoddy or they don't publish as regularly as I'd like, but at least they're real and I can connect with them and I'm going to subscribe to the show and I'm listening to the story because there is some personal connection there. They're not going to find that in the AI world.

Kevin: 11:29

So, as optimistically a spin on it as I can put. That would be. It would be it. I think it's a reason to keep podcasting. I think it could be opportunistic for people who are really excited about creating content in this space.

Alban: 11:39

Five star review. This was made by a real person.

Jordan: 11:44

All right. So our next episode podcasting myth busters. I usually do a call to action where we still need you to send in responses for our next episode, but actually we have so many great podcasting myths If you want to send some in, you still can. But I got to be honest, guys. We have a plethora of really solid podcasting myths to bust and we might have to split this episode up into another episode sometime in the future. It's going to be a lot of fun, so I'm really looking forward to the next episode.

Alban: 12:17

Awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to recording it.

Jordan: 12:19

Yeah, so thank you all so much for listening and keep podcasting.