“As long as podcasting remains something people think of as an authentic experience,” said Matt Shapo, the director of digital audio and video at the IAB, “I’m not sure we’ll ever have the same level of disruption when it comes to content production.”
There are exceptions, of course.
Certain genres of podcast are likely to be outsourced to AI, the same way commodity text content has been replaced by ChatGPT. Podcasts recapping sports games, detailing the weather, or offering a synopsis of a news article are already popular use cases for the technology. In these cases, according to Glenday, listeners have a connection to the content, not the creator.
“Commodity podcasting—news, weather, daily rundowns—could be replaced,” said Alison Tucker, an associate director of audio investment at Omnicom Media Group. “But basically everything else? That’s much harder.”
The divide is reflective of a wider trend reshaping digital media. As AI dramatically reduces the effort required to create generic content, publishers and consumers are increasingly gravitating toward creator-led content, where personality can distinguish it from the deluge of information now inundating the web.
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Still, the confidence among podcasters is disorienting, as AI has engendered existential dread into nearly every other sector of the economy.
That optimism—misplaced or otherwise—is also exactly where Inception Point sees its opportunity, according to CEO and cofounder Jeanine Wright.
The idea for the company came from the pandemic, when cofounder William Corbin created a popular podcast, called Covid 411, simply by reading the daily CDC update into a mic. The series spurred Corbin to think about other ways to make timely content that people want with low production costs, Wright said.
While the ambitions of the startup are broader than podcasts, the company started with the medium because the technology surrounding synthetic audio is already advanced enough that it’s difficult to tell the difference between a real and artificial voice.
By combining that capability with timely subject matter, the company aims to produce quick, low-lift audio products that only need to find a small audience to recoup their minimal costs. Already, Inception Point has more than 4,000 of these AI-generated shows, publishing thousands of episodes a week on platforms including iHeartMedia’s Spreaker. (Some of the flash-published series include biographies of zeitgeist subjects including Austin Butler, Ozzy Osborne, and Charlie Kirk.)