A deluge of podcasts, hosted by AI

Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AIgenerated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.

- NILESH CHRISTOPHER

AI-GENERATED podcasts and their hosts, sounding nearly indistinguishable from their human counterparts, are flooding the market.

Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters' confidence and research are now arguably better than most people's.

"We've just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human," said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. "We're seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways." AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.

Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.

Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast "Diary of a CEO." On YouTube, his clone narrates "100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett," which adds AIgenerated animation to Bartlett's cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.

Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast "The Newsworthy," let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.

She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.

"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.