[dzink]

The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities:

1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue.

2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend sell ads as well.

3) Attempt to dominate the niche for sale of knitting products. Or to pretend to dominate it so they can sell their the business later at a larger multiple.

4) Test the waters of a much bigger engine for doing 1-3 above in an innocuous hidden subject, before they do it with elections or some other more profitable field. Regulatory waters as well - seeing what they can get away with.

Feel free to brainstorm more incentives for making something like this.

[williamdclt]

I don't understand your question, are you asking what's the financial incentive to AI-generate thousands of podcasts a week? Isn't it obviously the income from streams and/or ads?

[Carp]

Did you read the article? Headcount went from 300 to 8, number of podcast per day went up and apparently listenership went up.

[surgical_fire]

This only works if there are people willingly listening to crap.

Perhaps there are.

[bluGill]

Are they? Or do they think they are listening to something real?

I've enjoy reading alt-history at times. However I can only enjoy this when it is clear that this isn't real history. Often one of the more enjoyable parts is authors notes of how real history differs.

I have heard some human written songs that really sounded real and tugged at the heart strings - until I found out it was fiction, and then I was offended. The key here is that it showed someone good (to modern ideals - they all considered themselves good Christians) existed in a timeline where they where we know almost nobody was good.

[catapart]

the bitch of it, though, is that it doesn't only work if people listen to it. it also works if a bunch of AI bots can convincingly fake people listening to it. and, of course, those types of bots exist and have financial incentive to continue faking it, too.

at some point, these two competing interests are going to find out that they're paying each other to stare at each other's dwindling profits, but my bet is that it's going to be a while yet before that wake up call. and it will be an even longer churn into something else because no one is going to admit that they were funneling money into nonsense for years. they're going to "adjust strategies" to "modernize against changing markets" for "new potential growth". all shit that takes a long time to do because it's a half measure aimed at saving face to investors. so it'll work for a long time just based on the momentum of bullshit. =/

[Romario77]

they said, podcasts had 12 million downloads. 750k weekly at the moment.

They get people listening. And when you download you don't know it will be crap AI slop.

I now get a bunch of this in youtube - just endless drivel about some theme I am interested in. They create so much crap it's hard to see which one is real. I started banning the accounts that are making AI crap, but there are so many now.

[thechao]

I think the question he's asking is this: is it an ad ouroboros, or is there some other (nefarious?) intentionality behind it?

My hot take: porque no los dos?

[ytoawwhra92]

Podcast network is an established and proven business model. You spend money to make episodes, you make money from ads. You make a bunch of different podcasts with a bunch of different target demos to reach a wider range of listeners and this grows your revenue and makes it more consistent. It's not complicated.

The specific incentives for starting a slop network are the promises of increased margins via reduced production costs (don't have to pay any pesky creative types) and more rapid growth via reduced production time (you can theoretically produce an episode in about the time it takes to listen to one, perhaps less).

I explored starting an AI slop network a few years ago. The tech wasn't quite ready at the time. My motivation was far more base: watching numbers go up.