Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. It looks like it's time to introduce a 'hosted by humans' badge for podcasts: Bloomberg reports that some 39% of new podcasts are now "likely" generated by AI, as per data from the Podcast Index that tracks the ecosystem. This shouldn't come as a surprise really, as producing AI-hosted audio is now incredibly simple, and very fast. You can make your own AI podcast through a tool such as NotebookLM in just a few minutes — feed in a few sources to work from, and you get two AI hosts chatting through them. You can even interject with your own comments. Even if this isn't surprising, though, it's still disappointing. Another form of human creativity and curation has been polluted by AI slop (or 'podslop'), and it's something I'm going to avoid as much as I possibly can.
Published: May 10, 2026 1:01 am
Source: TechRadar — Read original