Nearly 40% of new podcasts uploaded recently are believed to be generated by artificial intelligence (AI), according to a Bloomberg report citing data from the Podcast Index website. A total of 10,871 new podcast episodes have been published in the past 9 days, with 4,243 episodes, or 39%, being AI-generated.
Similar to the issue plaguing the music industry, the use of generative AI to produce content for streaming platforms is increasing. Episodes can be generated by simply entering scripts that are also generated by AI to quickly produce podcasts, as offered by Google NotebookLM.
The company Inception Point, for example, has 10,000 active podcast shows generated by AI. It can produce 877 new episodes in just 48 hours. This is an output that is impossible for humans to achieve manually.
Podcast platforms currently do not have any guidelines regarding AI-generated podcasts. Spotify only introduced human artist badges last week to differentiate music generated by AI artists. Perhaps it's time the same badges were extended to human podcast channels.
