from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept

Amazon Gets Into The AI Podcast Slop Business

Late last year we wrote about a new startup that was flooding the internet with AI-generated podcast slop. Featuring fake hosts having fake discussions, the startup proudly stated it was creating about 3,000 new AI-generated podcasts every single week. The owners of the startup (who called critics of AI slop “Luddites,”) stated that because they cost so little to produce, even selling 30 episodes for a dollar nets them a tidy profit when scaled up appropriately.

That this results in an internet positively full of lazy mass-produced cack — and what that does to the public interest, authentic creators, and informed consensus — doesn’t really enter into it.

Not to be outdone, Amazon appears poised to join the AI slop podcast race. The company announced this week that it had begun mass producing AI-generated podcasts featuring two fake experts having conversations about all sorts of stuff. More specifically, Amazon is reformatting Alexa+’s extended answers on different topics and turning them into “podcasts.”

During this process, Jeff Bezos owned software will express manufactured opinions on all sorts of things, from the death of monoculture to the health of the U.S. recording industry:

“In an example clip shared by Amazon of the new Alexa Podcasts feature, the two AI-generated hosts discuss “the latest music releases.” A male Alexa+ narrator says more than 50% of music listening now comes from unsigned artists. “The monoculture is just gone,” a female-voiced Alexa+ narrator chimes in. The male Alexa+ host says there has been “stoner metal,” indie pop and experimental hip-hop music “all dropping on the same Friday,” and adds, “That’s not chaos — that’s the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.”

Cool.

For some reason the Variety story didn’t quote the best part of the shared Amazon example clip; namely where software in a female voice informs you that there’s no gatekeeping anymore and authenticity rules the day:

“There’s no gatekeeping anymore. If you make something real people are going to find it, and the algorithm is working for artists in a way it wasn’t five years ago.”

Clearly concerned that people would accuse them of creating yet more lazy and quickly automated engagement slop in the era of AI obituary scams, Amazon is pinky swearing that journalists will play a central role in fact-checking the content:

“Seemingly to dispel the notion that these “podcasts” will be AI audio slop, Amazon emphasized that it has deals with major news organizations to ensure “accurate, real-time news and information.” Those include the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico and USA Today; publications from Condé Nast, Hearst and Vox Media; and more than 200 local newspapers across the U.S.”

All that extra journalistic manpower just laying around from places like the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post (which just fired 300 journalists and shitcanned its last black female opinion columnist). Or Business Insider, one of the cornerstones of what I call “CEO said a thing!” pseudo journalism. Or Forbes, which now just lets any random yahoo contribute as a “regular columnist.” Or Vox, which is about to be sold off to Rupert Murdoch’s kid. Or Politico, the website owned by a rich German Trump fan.

You know, all the places that have been hollowed out by layoffs and mismanaged into the ground by incompetent billionaires who have no idea how anything works and are keen to produce a giant badly automated engagement ouroborus that shits money without needing to pay human beings a living wage (or health insurance).

In effect they’re using software automation to algorithmically hijack and repackage the informed expertise of other people, then reselling it to you as something new. With some lip service to the idea that there are enough journalists left to maintain factual quality control over large language models prone to errors, plagiarism, and all sorts of disastrous fuckery at scale.

I desperately want to believe that as we accelerate into the era of badly automated mass engagement slop, there will be a value premium placed on authentic expertise. That the bland homogenized vibe coded half-assed sameness being plattered up at impossible new scale will usher forth a renaissance for real connection, genuine skill, actual talent, and human expertise.

But then I remember what most people buy at the grocery store. And the kind of people dictating the contours of both large language models and our increasingly consolidated, authoritarian-friendly media gatekeeping systems. And I quickly have my doubts that authentic expertise and connection has any meaningful chance of being heard above the din.