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. =/

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.

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.