Everyone has a podcast these days, even people who aren’t actually human. The Hollywood Reporter recently ran a profile on Starting Point AI—a company that’s in the business of flooding the podcast landscape with so much AI-generated slant that you just can’t avoid it—a strategy that the company seems to think is working, at least.
If you haven’t heard of Starting Point AI, you’re not alone — the company has been operating in stealth mode until recently. But if you regularly look for new podcasts to listen to, you’ve probably come across some of their products. Per Thr, Starting Point operates the Silence Please Podcast Network , which has over 5,000 shows on its platform. If you head over to the company’s website, you’ll notice a couple of standouts, like “Diddy Verdict,” a three-episode series covering the Sean Combs trial, or “Alligator Alcatraz,” which covers that sprawling immigration detention center built in the Florida Everglades. Scroll through and you’ll see a bunch of podcasts focused on specific topics: skiing, bunkers, menopause, etc. It feels like an SEO game in the podcast space, just flooding the area with frequently searched topics and trying to come up at the top of the list.
What you won’t see is any disclosure that these are AI-generated shows—not on the website, not in the podcast descriptions, and not in the audio itself (at least in the episodes we listened to—according to THR, the company has started adding disclosures in episodes that the hosts are AI). It seems like the company doesn’t care about its audience, as much as it has one, all that much. “I think people who still refer to all AI-generated content as AI slop probably don’t care,” THR reported in an interview.
“Good” here is pretty subjective. There are plenty of podcasts that offer listeners original reviews, unique insights and analysis, or at least interesting voices. AI-generated podcasts can basically only offer a facsimile of that, regurgitating the work of others to produce something vaguely acceptable.
But what AI can do that humans can’t is match the AI shell. It seems Inception Point believes that’s where they’ll get their leg up in the podcasting space. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the company produces about 3,000 new episodes a week, which cost about $1 per episode and take about an hour to get from inception to release for public listening. If that seems like a waste of dollars, the company’s math is pretty simple. With the program’s advertising attached to each of the company’s uploads, it only needs about 20 listeners per episode to make a profit, according to THR.
The company claims to have generated around 10 million downloads as of September 2023, which, frankly, isn’t that much considering the sheer volume of shows and episodes it produces, but it’s apparently enough for the company to continue to expand. The company has created around 50 AI personalities that serve as hosts, and it’s thinking about ways to expand their functionality, including things like “chatting” with listeners or singing “happy birthday” to them, like cameos but completely fabricated “celebrities.”
“We believe that in the near future, half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that brings those people to life,” Wright told Thr, clearly uninterested in wondering whether this is a thing that should happen or is something that anyone wants.
