Amazon’s AI-generated Alexa+ podcasts are utter podslop

It’s a podcast, but make it hosted by two AI-generated hosts talking to each other about the game last night.

Reader, I hate it.

Announced on Tuesday, Alexa Podcasts is Amazon’s latest venture for Alexa+, the company’s rebooted AI-powered virtual assistant. Described by the company as “AI-generated audio episodes on any topic,” these on-demand offerings essentially replace an entire team of human podcast producers and presenters with artificial intelligence — “no documents or prep work needed.”

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It’s essentially a Big Tech-backed pile of “podslop” or AI-generated podcasts, which are on the rise along with other AI audio formats. A recent analysis by The Podcast Index found that 39 percent of recently uploaded podcasts were probably created using AI, with companies like Inception Point AI churning out the episodes.

Now, Amazon’s joining the surge with Alexa Podcasts. Users (anyone with a Prime membership) can ask the AI assistant to cover any topic from news roundups to sports results to the consensus of movie reviews, “and let you adjust the length and direction conversationally.” That means you can pick both the AI assistant’s personality — these are dubbed “Alexa, Brief, Sweet, Chill, and Sassy” — and its “conversation style” — “from concise and efficient to warm and conversational.”

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Then, Alexa will generate a short episode with two AI hosts, which will be sent to your Echo device and the Alexa app.

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Without a human research team, where is all this precious information coming from? According to Amazon, over 200 news publications have signed up as sources, including local U.S. newspapers as well as “Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post,…

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