Inception Point AI is flooding the zone with AI-generated podcasts.
The company lists 4,749 AI-generated shows on Spreaker under its Quiet Please brand. It claims its podcasts have been downloaded 10 million times since September 2023 and it is publishing 3,000 new episodes a week.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Inception Point AI CEO Jeanine Wright said that “in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.” She said that critics “who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop” are “probably lazy luddites.”1
Over the past few days, I listened to 19 episodes from Quiet Please’s catalog and reviewed or sampled dozens more. I wouldn’t say all AI-generated content is AI slop — but I’d definitely use the term for what I heard on these shows.
Across 202 minutes-worth of synthetic podcasts, I was subjected to several AI audio freakouts, including startling groans, randomly repeated words, and incomprehensible sentences pronounced mid-stream.
Even when the audio functioned correctly, the podcasts were metaphor-heavy regurgitations of basic facts – what you might get if you ask ChatGPT to tell you about a topic and hit “Read aloud.”
But the real problem is the network’s swaggering claims of AI supremacy. The Quiet Please shows aren’t presented as experiments, a new format worth exploring with kinks that need to be ironed out. The podcasts, listeners are told, are not just as good as those produced by humans. They are better.
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