The CEO of a company that’s pumping out thousands of lazily AI-generated podcasts thinks everybody is complaining too much about having AI slop shoved down their throats.
Inception Point AI CEO Jeanine Wright told the Hollywood Reporter that “people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites.”
It’s an incendiary comment, likely aimed to provoke a debate. While the billions the AI industry is spending to help students cheat on their homework are controversial enough, the tech’s use in the media landscape is proving even more controversial.
Polls have shown that users have become increasingly disillusioned and distrustful of AI. Research has also found that as users become more familiar with generative AI, they become less likely to trust it as they learn its limitations — a phenomenon that effectively contradicts Wright’s argument.
In other words, those who are calling out the proliferation of “AI slop” tend to be more informed, rather than “lazy luddites.”
Her comments also appear to ignore the origins of the term “luddite,” which was historically a movement of textile workers who actively protested poor working conditions and the replacement of labor by automated machinery during the 19th century.
Besides, as author Brian Merchant points out in his book “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” the actual historical Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were against machinery that destroyed livelihoods for the sake of enriching capitalists, while embracing machinery that allowed them to do their jobs better — a fitting analog to our present day.
Inception Point boasts that it can produce each episode across more than 5,000 of its podcast shows for $1 or less each.
That means that if only 20 people listen to an episode, the company — which is currently bootstrapped and has yet to pay out salaries to its employees, according to the Reporter — claims it could turn a profit.
Whether anybody wants to listen to robots drone on about a subject is an untested question. The web has already been hit by a tidal wave of poorly devised and often misleading AI slop, leading to plenty of frustration and alarm bells over the erosion of human creativity.
“Flooding the zone with just an endless parade of human simulacrum isn’t going to do great things for the Internet’s already hugely problematic signal to noise ratio,” TechDirt wrote in response to Wright, “or the public’s ability to differentiate the wheat from the chaff.”
To Wright, it’s a given that human creators will be replaced — a fate she thinks should be celebrated and capitalized on, not feared.
“We believe 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 told the Reporter.
Besides pumping out thousands of AI podcasts, Inception Point also aims to turn AI-generated personalities into influencers on social media, a tactic vaguely reminiscent of Meta’s ill-fated attempts to launch AI chatbots based on real-world celebrities and load its platforms with AI-powered characters.
For its podcasts, the Inception’s AI chooses topics based on Google data and social media trends, according to the Reporter. It then launches five different versions of each show to see if any of them stick. To double down on search engine optimization, some of the podcasts’ titles are extremely basic, such as “Whales,” a show about whales.
Wright defends those appalling practices, saying it’s all a numbers game.
“We might make a pollen podcast that maybe only 50 people listen to, but I’m already at unit profitability on that, and so then maybe I can make 500 pollen report podcasts,” she told the Reporter.
While much of the process is informed by AI, Inception’s content team still creates outlines, assigns each AI personality as a host, and adds music.
The tech’s well-documented propensity to hallucinate also doesn’t appear to be much of a sticking point, as shows are also only “spot-checked periodically,” per the Reporter.
In short, Inception appears to be the poster child of why users are increasingly fed up with having generative AI intrude into almost every aspect of their daily lives. Podcasting, in particular, is a medium that lends itself to fostering a human connection.
Treating it as an AI-facilitated cash cow doesn’t feel true to the medium — and Wright’s comments drive home that the execs behind the push don’t really care.
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