some other creators Don’t even expect the public as its output, especially once the novelty wears off. Andi Durrant, for example, helped create an AI-generated podcast called Synthetic Stories at his UK-based content marketing startup. In addition to featuring cloned host voices, any other elements of Synthetic Stories is AI generated, including script and sound design. “We were proud of it as an experiment,” Durrant says. But as a creative job? “You really quickly get the limitations.”
However, Dimitris Nikolaou, CEO of WondercraftAI, an AI podcast startup, believes audiences could develop loyalty towards AI-generated podcasts. His team created Roundup of hacker news, which offers brief daily roundups of the top stories on the Hacker News forum, run by Y Combinator, as a proof of concept to show what its platform can do. It currently ranks 31st on Apple Podcasts’ tech chart in the US (Elsewhere, it’s doing even better. “We’re currently number two in Latvia for some reason,” Nikolaou says.)
Nikolaou doesn’t think so Roundup of hacker newsAI-generated scripts are superior to those written by humans, or their artificial voices are more melodic. “There is nothing special about it. It’s the same content you’d find on any other tech podcast,” he says. “It’s more the fact that we can be so consistent and post every morning, no matter what.”
The podcast is designed to show how Wondercraft services work: both the script and the audio are generated by AI based on the posts that appear at the top of Hacker News. (Wondercraft got permission from Y Combinator to use its content, which isn’t particularly surprising; the startup incubator is also one of its investors.) For people who just want an audio summary of information, it’s a consistent offering.
He also thinks Wondercraft will appeal to some freelance creative types, such as newsletter writers who might want to publish an audio version of their blog posts but don’t have the time to do it themselves or the money to hire a reader.
Human podcasters have it has already started to adopt AI editing tools, which are frequently used by major podcasting studios. These tools can simplify tasks like removing background noise or clarifying mumbled words. And some are toying with the idea of cloning their voices for commercials. This week, for example, the founder of The Ringer, Bill Simmons discussed the ability to develop ads read by hosts’ AI-generated voice clones for your stable of Spotify podcasts.
However, fully AI-generated presenters are another story.
WHO? Weekly co-hosts Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber see potential use cases for AI editing tools, but don’t envision AI speech generation tools having any real value for their long-running beloved podcast. “The only way it would make sense is in a literal joke,” says Finger. “It’s not convincing.”
Kelsey McKinney, the presenter of the recent great success normal gossip, is skeptical that AI-powered podcasts will connect with audiences in a lasting way. “The AI stuff, I just hate it, in all forms,” she says. “People want to feel connected to other people. The reason podcasts are so popular is because listeners feel connected to the people who create them.”
McKinney sees AI podcasts as part of a larger push by entertainment corporations to automate and devalue the arts, an effort that is being led by cost-cutting executives rather than creators. “They want to use AI for podcasts. They want to use AI to write scripts. They want to use AI for the actors,” she says. “What they’re trying to say is they don’t want to pay creative people.”
Especially with podcasts like WHO? Weekly and Normal people— chatty, digressive, funny, weird — the main draw of tuning in week after week is hearing what specific humans have to say on the mic. No matter how advanced the technology, the idea that a robot could fully replicate the experience remains pure science fiction. (Spike Jonze She 2: She starts a podcast hitting theaters in 2033.)
