16 Comments
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Tom White's avatar

Proverbs 19:9: “A false witness will not go unpunished, and whoever pours out lies will perish.”

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Profusion's avatar

It's essentially just theft from advertisers and fraud upon content platforms. Does everything just turn into a grift eventually?

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Sean Byrnes's avatar

I don't know anything about this company, but have you tried the podcast generation feature of Google's NotebookLLM? It's really amazing, and a great way to digest topics. I expect a lot of people prefer it to reading and it makes complicated topics a bit more accessible.

I'm all for tools like that.

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Adam Singer's avatar

Yeah you can use the AI tools *directly* to get audio you want, without going through an intermediary using them as a vehicle to inject ads, that's great!

I'm just not sure I want to open a streaming app and be fed hastily prompted recordings on god knows what topic, by models I have no idea about, that really just exist as a volume play to generate ad revenue.

I will open the AI app for AI :)

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Stephen Moore's avatar

Was going to write about the very same thing. Like all “tools” the intention is everything — and the intention is all wrong here

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Adam Singer's avatar

That's right

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Fahad's avatar

Amen. We don’t need this slop. It’s also why people reject lip sync music. It’s not real.

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AJDeiboldt-The High Notes's avatar

Finance people are absolutely dumb enough to throw money at a company like this if they believe it can generate returns. After all, they've assisted drug cartels and human trafficking operations so this is morally gray at best for them.

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Gregory Kennedy's avatar

AI podcasts may be destroying civilization. Meanwhile, most can't get humans to listen to their real podcast.

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Adam Singer's avatar

There's something like 20K active human-created podcasts. Many are really great! It's incredibly dumb the streaming platforms would ever knowingly allow any of the AI spam to rank ahead of it. Let them publish it of course, but algo send it all to 0 they can get listens purely if they are able to generate traffic to it. Don't gift the grifters attention

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Gregory Kennedy's avatar

I agree the grifters suck, but my guess is some form of AI content will be popular with consumers. The Spotify band that hit millions of plays was actually compelling. I was shocked. All I know after 20 years in startups is that no one knows anything.

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Adam Singer's avatar

You're confusing something that generated plays from an algo as important. How many viral tweets happen daily that have millions or 10s of millions of impressions. None of it matters. None of it moves culture. Instantly forgotten trash. Anyway, there will always be black hat spammers who trick people and algos, but the thing is - you do it quietly you don't brag to the media about it and think you have a real company. They're all the same as dumb criminals

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Gregory Kennedy's avatar

Tell us how you really feel. LOL.

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Adam Singer's avatar

I mean - note how you couldn't even name the band. Also they get a rounding error of money from a million (or millions) of streams. The podcast grift only works bc it has ads pasted to the front of the show. The music grifters make nothing from streaming (just like the actual musicians) bc the economics are so bad. You'd have to get people pay $200 to show up to an AI show to make any money (lol)

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Unstick's avatar

I really like Darren Hardy. However, he tried to do a weekly AI-generated compilation of his daily morning messages and it came across as shallow and dystopian. He quickly changed tack. Hopefully, the rest of the media industry does too.

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IPHawk's avatar

I can see the future scandal, AI Podcast with fake AI users and metrics.

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