Generative AI Podcasts Are Here. Prepare to Be Bored

Much gnashing of teeth about how increased production from AI is going to decrease quality of life.

On its face this is a second-order impact term though right? If you live in the fat tail (ie not already saturated) then more content could be a big improvement even if AI generated. And one of the big lessons of the last decade or two is that most people have some niche interests as well as some degree of mainstream ones. I bet on a continuation of the trend of fractal micro-hobbies.

However I think there is another first-order term that’s being under appreciated- AI improves discoverability and quantity consumed by search/retrieval and summarization.

Once the tooling has been figured out I’ll be able to get personalized AI recommendations and summaries of all the content I would normally consume through well-known sites and RSS, and thereby stay abreast of way more fields, and sift through way more content. Concretely for podcasts - currently I just scroll through a few podcasts I follow and see if any look especially interesting, but I expect soon to be able to get a weekly/monthly email with just the “shortlist quality” relevant ones.

Maybe it turns out to be way harder to filter with AI and overall quality ratios go down, but I’m quite skeptical and we haven’t tested this with real products. I’d reserve judgement until we get a bit further into the product cycle.

Discoverability for artists is already almost impossible. With all the ai spam to come, god help anybody with talent who tries to get noticed who doesn’t already have a large following

The more and more generated content by AI (audio, images, text, files etc) will turn Internet into trash.

Swyx disagrees: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1661848597728575489