It’s a podcast, but it was hosted by two AI-generated hosts talking to each other about the game last night.
Student, I hatred it.
Announced Tuesday, Alexa Podcasts is the latest venture for Amazon’s Alexa+, the company’s relaunched AI-powered assistant. Described by the company as “AI-generated audio episodes on any topic,” these on-demand offerings replace an entire team of podcast producers and presenters with artificial intelligence — “no scripts or prep work required.”
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It is essentially a Big Tech-backed collection of “podslop” or AI-generated podcasts, which are expanding along with other AI audio formats. A recent analysis by The Podcast Index found that 39 percent of newly uploaded podcasts may have been created using AI, with companies like Inception Point AI churning out episodes.
Now, Amazon is joining the fray with Alexa Podcasts. Users (or anyone with a prime membership) can ask the AI assistant to cover any topic from news gathering to sports scores to movie review deals, “and let you adjust the length and direction of the conversation.” That means you can choose both the AI assistant’s personality – these are called “Alexa, Brief, Sweet, Chill, and Sassy” – and its “conversational style” – “from short and efficient to warm and chatty.”
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After that, Alexa will generate a short clip about the two AI hosts, which will be sent to your Echo device and the Alexa app.
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Without a human group of researchers, where does all this valuable information come from? According to Amazon, it has registered more than 200 news publications as sources, including local US newspapers and “Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico, USA Today, and publications from Condé Nast, Hearst, and Vox.” Cool cool cool.
Everything about this makes me want to throw my technology into the ocean, especially if you listen to… examples Amazon provided Soundcloud (on Soundcloud!). Why listen to carefully researched history podcasts like Greg Jenner’s? He is dead to Me and Marc Fennell Items British Stole where you can have two AI voices repeating Ancient Roman truths to you? Who needs quality investigative journalism in a time as simple as this? Why you should be taught by music historians like Cole Cuchna in Separate where can you get an AI to tell you what’s good? Why listen to real athletes and sports commentators present their analysis of the game when you can hear it being produced?
I listen to podcasts for hosts, whose personalities and production teams can be replicated by Alexa’s “Sassy conversational” or “Brief efficient” settings – Ira Glass, Trixie and Katya; Hrishikesh Hirway; Kid Fury and Crissle West; Monét X Change and Bob The Drag Queen; Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang; Kara Swisher; Taylor Lorenz; Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad; Keke Palmer; Amy Poehler; Jon Lovett; Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, and Glen Weldon; Richard Osman and Marina Hyde; Louis Virtel, and many others, not to mention the huge number of human news teams that provide daily news podcasts from the BBC to CNN, and our colleagues at Mashable are pouring their wisdom and energy into this project.
Enough with platforms like Spotify and Libby feeling the discomfort of AI-generated music and audiobooks, now podcasters are two AI chatbots talking to each other? I don’t want to, as Amazon suggests, “turn your dinner table conversations into learning opportunities.” What, we’re collecting ‘Alexa for an AI-generated podcast on the Apollo 11 mission? I’m out of here.
