Photo Credit: Luther Yonel
At least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes are available on platforms like Spotify and Apple. This company is churning out 3,000 episodes a week.
As the rise of artificial intelligence seems to affect most of the entertainment and tech sectors, at least podcasting remains safe, right? Wrong. Already, there are at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes available on platforms like Spotify—thanks to startup Inception Point AI. The company, with just eight employees, is churning out a whopping 3,000 AI-generated podcast episodes a week.
But is anyone actually listening to this content? You might be surprised. Inception Point AI’s podcasting network, Quiet Please, has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and 400,000 subscribers.
With companies dropping over a million jobs this year alone, many citing AI as a driving factor, evidence suggests that the promise and rise of AI really can come for any and every job. But podcasting and other creative endeavors have largely been considered to be held to a different standard in the realm of AI; after all, isn’t the allure of a podcast the personality of its host?
However, Inception Point’s ability to unleash episodes at a clip unmatched by any human team proves that throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks can pay off in the world of AI “slop.” Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright posits that it’s proof that automation can make podcasting “scalable, profitable, and accessible” without human writers, editors, or even hosts.
“The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,” said Wright. “You can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them.”
Inception Point’s content covers everything from localized weather reports to biography series and anything in between. At a cost of $1 per episode, the company’s quantity-over-quality approach is paying dividends.
“Riches are in the niches, for sure,” said Wright. “My friends in the podcasting industry, they’ll ask, ‘Do you have any show that’s in the top 10? How are your shows charting?’ We don’t even think about it like that.”
Inception Point, which calls itself “the audio version of Reddit or Wikipedia,” is pairing “hyper-specialized” content with different AI personalities to attract targeted audiences. The company selects its shows and topics, specifically avoiding subjects that might be tricky for the AI models to cover so that human review for each episode is not required.
The bulk of the effort is actually put into the company’s AI host personalities, of which it has over 120. The company says it leans into specific niches, trends, and search engine optimization to reach targeted listeners.
“Instead of having to be really focused on trying to build the next Kelce Brothers, the next Crime Junkie, the next Joe Rogan, these huge shows, you could serve niche audiences and micro communities,” said Wright. “It’s just a totally different business model.”
Each episode needs only 20 listeners to turn a profit. Inception Point notes it monetizes with iHeartRadio as a partner—but representatives for the platform told TheWrap they were unfamiliar with it. Regardless, just like traditional “human” podcasting, the company generates revenue from programmatic ads that play during its episodes.
“I think very quickly we get to a place where AI is a default way that content is made, not just across audio, but across television and film and commercials and imagery, and everything. And then we will disclose when things are not made with AI instead of that they were made with AI,” said Wright. “But for now, we are perfectly happy leading the way.”
