AI Slop Startup To Flood The Internet With Thousands Of AI Slop Podcasts, Calls Critics Of AI Slop ‘Luddites’

So look, I'm not one of these people who thinks AI" has no useful applications. Just this week I had an efficient conversation with a Gemini chatbot when trying to cancel a Google subscription. I used ChatGPT to help me fact check my own work debunking false claims made by a different AI (an aggregation AI analysis newsbot) while doing research on broadband policy. Isn't the future grand.

But I do think there's useful automation, and then just a massive layer of hype, bullshit, fraud, fake profitability estimates, and vast product misrepresentation by the kind of VC hustlebros who profit off the front end of hype cycles, then disappear when the check comes due. These additional layers surrounding AI" is where the coming bubble pop will happen, something Gartner analysts call the trough of disillusionment," which they expect to hit the sector hard sometime next year.

Meanwhile, the rushed application of undercooked automation is having hugely problematic impacts across privacy, energy, climate, propaganda, mental health, public safety, and labor. Often thanks to the kind of people in power who are shaping AI's application across the culture. A lot of these folks (see: major media owners) aren't looking to make our lives better, they're looking to leverage automation as a way to attack labor, mislead people, or create a badly automated ouroboros of ad-engagement bullshit.

Case in point: a new startup named Inception Point AI is preparing to flood the internet with a thousands upon thousands of LLM-generated podcasts hosted by fake experts and influencers. The podcasts cost the startup a dollar or so to make, so even if just a few dozen folks subscribe they hope to break even:

The company is able to produce each episode for $1 or less, depending on length and complexity, and attach programmatic advertising to it. This generally means that if about 20 people listen to that episode, the company made a profit on that episode, without factoring in overhead."

Of course just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Podcasting is already a very saturated space full of a lot of useless noise. Flooding the zone with just an endless parade of human simulacrum isn't going to do great things for the Internet's already hugely problematic signal to noise ratio, or the public's ability to differentiate the wheat from the chaff.

And that's before you factor in the extreme energy and climate costs of generating that noise.

Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright seems a little sensitive about whether her company is engaged in anything useful or good, quickly dismissing critics of the plan to flood the Internet with focus-group-tested, homogenized slop Luddites":

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,"said CEO Jeanine Wright, who was previously chief operating officer of podcasting companyWondery, which has recently had to reorganize under the changing podcast landscape."

And by reorganize," The Hollywood Reporter means they recently fired a bunch of human beings in a pivot to video," a common dysfunctional siren song across badly managed modern media empires (see Vice and countless others) trying desperately to be relevant in ever-shifting media markets. It's very possible this pivot to video" ends like the rest, but many of the questions it presents still stand.

I desperately want to believe that flooding the Internet with homogenized, focus-group-tested blather probably isn't a winning strategy. I very much want to believe this approach will create a premium value on real people, artists, creators, and journalists who actually have something real to say. But I've met many of my fellow Americans, and I'm simply not sure that's going to be the case.

Inception Point CEO is just one of hundreds of companies flooding this space with cheaply produced simulacrum. What happens when you have an internet packed with quickly made, cheap gibberish? In an era when expertise and real journalism are already under fire by an unholy alliance between corporate power and modern authoritarianism?

Will people flock to informed, intelligent quality? Or will they simply get lost in a maze of badly-automated lazy engagement porn built by people whose singular interest is making money at unmanageable scale with zero concern about the ethical impact (see: Mark Zuckerberg), making informed consensus and factual reality harder to collectively grasp than ever?

I'm not sure anybody knows yet. You're certainly not being a Luddite" if you ask. Meanwhile, Inception Point AI already has more than 5,000 shows across its Quiet Please Podcast Network and produces somewhere around 3,000 episodes a week, with 10 million downloads since September 2023.