Swarm of AI bots is disrupting podcast industry

[AI podcasts, from A1] selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.

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"I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, 'I'm sick," Mandy said.

Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.

Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren't sure what to think.

"A lot of people were like, 'That was weird,'" Mandy said.

In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly.

The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in post-production or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.

Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.

Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won't attract premium ad rates.

"Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great," he said. "I'm not interested in devaluing premium."