The podcast format has largely remained the same since its inception in the early 2000s: short shows recorded by hosts and distributed digitally to entertain or bring listeners up to date on the news.
But with the advent of AI, tech companies are keen to stomp the essence out of what makes the format so appealing in the first place: a human-to-human connection.
As such, the Washington Post announced this week that it’s launching an AI-based podcast service that allows listeners to pick their own format and even their own disembodied AI host.
The “Your Personal Podcast” is now available to users on the newspaper’s mobile app as of today — but whether anybody will pick up on the company’s offer to be inundated with potentially misinformed AI slop remains to be seen.
After Semafor‘s Max Tani highlighted the announcement on Bluesky, the reactions were almost unanimous.
“Stop trying to shove AI down my throat,” one user replied. “I don’t want it anywhere at all.”
One user likened it to “giving matches to toddlers,” while another predicted an “absolute disaster.”
Their concerns are certainly warranted, given the tech’s track record. Large language models have an extremely well-documented tendency to make up facts and further biases found in their training data, a reality made all the more problematic given the interests of WaPo‘s owner and Amazon cofounder Jeff Bezos.
Under his ownership, the newspaper has made major strides in converting itself into something approaching a tech company, a notable departure from its legacy as a trustworthy source of news.
The paper also announced a major shift to its opinion section earlier this year to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” drawing major concerns that it was losing its independence and journalistic neutrality. Bezos has maintained a warm relationship with president Donald Trump, leading some to warn that the newspaper was quickly turning into a conservative outlet beholden to the billionaire’s financial interests.
This year, WaPo has increasingly doubled down on AI, despite the media’s already disastrous attempts that have resulted in chaos and countless error-ridden news articles.
A WaPo spokesperson told Digiday that users could eventually chat with their AI podcast hosts to ask for clarification.
“The idea of a podcast you can talk back to, or converse with? That’s actually the power here,” podcast advertising agency Adopter Media CEO Glenn Rubenstein told the outlet.
“We really want to first think about how we can get to that broader audience swath before we start aggressively monetizing it,” he added.
Users remain deeply skeptical, highlighting a much broader disillusionment with AI.
“WaPo doing an end run around online misinformation by cutting out the middlemen and producing it themselves,” author Tyler King wrote in a post on Bluesky. “You can’t [quality control] this at scale.”
“Even models trained solely on internal data are not immune to hallucination,” he added. “This is the MadLibs of ‘podcasting.’”
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