AI is the Death of Daily Podcasts

The way we consume news is changing. Are daily podcasts like The Daily about to become obsolete? AI is here, and it’s changing everything.

Daily podcasts are one of the most popular and prolific genres of podcasts. They are released every weekday and cover a specific niche’s news. They are the modern alternative to a daily newspaper, the perfect way to stay updated on the news you care about while you commute to or from work every day.

The most popular podcast in this genre is The Daily from the New York Times, which is third on Apple’s Podcast charts. Countless other podcasts focus on every niche and market. The Daily Tech News Show covers tech news. BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour discusses Women’s voices and lives. The Daily Meditation Podcast discusses meditation. BBC Radio 5 Football Daily covers football ⚽️. The list goes on and on. If you are interested in something, chances are there is a daily podcast about it.

Thanks to AI, they will all be at death’s door within the next few years. There is no need to find the right daily podcast that interests you; AI will know what you’re interested in and how much time you have and can create it for you instantly.

The Rise of AI Audio

2024 was a massive year for Audio AI tools. From perfect voice cloning to generating realistic-sounding conversations, it’s all advanced rapidly in the last year.

Top of the pack is Google’s NotebookLM - the ability to create a podcast episode, voices, and all, with any content you provide. All is condensed down to let you input a complicated academic paper and get a podcast customized to your interests.

Skills that are only available to humans are rapidly being eroded and automated by AI. Humans can no longer create convincing conversations alone. We’re crossing the AI audio uncanny valley. There is still a human touch to podcasts, but how long can that last?

Don’t believe me? Here is a 30-minute podcast from NotebookLM from my own 2024 Things I Was Grateful For blog post. It does a great job summarizing the points made and turning it into a reasonably natural conversation.

The Advantages of Personalized AI News

One of the biggest goals of algorithmic feeds over the last decade has been customizing the news you receive. These feeds learn from users’ interests and customize their content to those interests. This is the next level: customizing the content itself based on those interests and generating it dynamically.

TikTok has proven how addictive a truly personalized algorithmic feed can be. That level of insight into a person, combined with fully customized content, can take it to another level.

Of course, there are some scary trade-offs with fully personalized news. The proliferation of algorithmic feeds has escalated the creation of “bubbles” and news “echo chambers.” Personalized AI-driven news takes that to another level.

Google’s “Daily Listen”: A Glimpse into the Future

In January, Google launched a “Daily Listen” feature in its Discover feed inside the Google app on iOS and Android. This feature takes news that Google thinks you will be interested in and creates a podcast about it.

I’ve never found the Google Discover feed to do a great job of knowing my interests and providing related articles, but this is the first step in the custom daily podcast realm. It shows the power of combining Google’s learnings about your interests and search history with their NotebookLM product.

You can see a future where you have a method of opting in and out of interests, customizing the length, and being able to “catch up” on the news you’ve missed. Whether it’s been a week or an hour, and if you have five minutes or an hour to listen. AI would be able to put together the perfect daily podcast for you.

Fake News Flourishes

We’ve all seen examples of Apple Intelligence’s attempts at summarizing messages and failing in a hilarious fashion. This is a low-stakes issue that can happen when AI is trying to summarize content.

The algorithmic feed saw the rise of hyper-polarizing websites that drove engagement - the Breitbart’s of the world. Combining the drive of AI companies to have usage with AI hallucinations and the demand for engagement is a scary possibility.

The AI Slop Cycle Continues

AI slop was one of the words of the year in 2024. AI generated content that is meaningless crap that is overly verbose while saying nothing at all. We’re already seeing low quality news articles profilerate across the internet, being scraped up by other AI algorithms, and used to train the next generation of AI models.

The decimation of the news industry has continued with AI. After barely surviving the upheavals in online advertising over the last decade, the new industry faces its existential threat.

Within the next year, the podcast industry is going to be as full of low-quality AI slop as the news industry is today.

How much life is left?

AI-driven podcasts are coming, whether we like them or not. Their first target is daily news podcasts, which have to be created quickly and are generally based on existing written news stories. This is the perfect target for AI.

What can a company like the New York Times do to avoid this? They have daily podcasts, write about the news, and are suing AI companies to protect their content. They have shown loyalty to their staff in the past, but if they don’t use AI in their podcast workflow, someone else will.