By Mike Pearl
Publication Date: 2026-05-03 09:00:00
In 2024, Google introduced what was then a fairly surprising new feature as part of its NotebookLM AI suite: audio excerpts of information that were essentially podcasts, sometimes with strangely familiar-sounding synthesized voices. It was a completely new implementation of generative AI. But it’s no longer new and AI adoption is progressing fairly quickly, so much so that AI-generated podcasts now account for as many as a third of new podcast feeds, according to the New Feeds Report on an open source site called Podcast Index.
Imagine what that means: an unimaginably large, seemingly endless torrent of synthetic chatter about every topic on earth, constantly bursting forth, like when the drains at the Three Gorges Dam are opened. And for which audience? It is not yet completely clear.
The bizarre bluster from executives at the companies that produce these podcasts appears to be directed at investors, not potential listeners. For example, in September last year…
