Listened to an AI-Generated podcast and I Don’t Feel Dirty

A few weeks ago, I made fun of a colleague. He told me he had been listening to AI-generated podcast summaries, and I gave him the kind of look you give someone who says they prefer airport sushi. Not sure what i said exactly but it was something like 'Now that is where i draw the line!'.

Fast forward, last weekend. My son had a basketball match and I had a long drive ahead of me. With 2 hours to kill, ​ I wanted to something informative to listen to. Lately I've been playing with Openclaw (late to the party) and wanted to dive deeper and learn about multi-agent orchestration and how to really make it work.

So I opened my podcast app, typed 'Openclaw', and found an episode that looked interesting.

It was a podcast with a great episode outline, relevant/up to date topics and a specific chapter on multi-agent workflows. The episode itself was a conversation between a male and female host and had a great intro you see in any other well made podcast.

A few minutes in - a little longer than i would like to admit, I realized that i was listening to AI-generated audio. This time it wasn't the — ​ but just the tone of voice, the perfection, word choice, the lack of emotion, …

And yet, I kept listening. For thirty minutes.

The uncomfortable part is that it was useful.

Not beautiful. Not soulful. But incredibly effective. Nobody gets distracted. No breathing in the microphone or weird banter. No laughter or an off-topic personal anecdote. No detours into a half remembered blog post they read…The information was incredibly condensed. It just kept summarizing, connecting, and explaining.

Making an AI podcast?

My guess is that the author did not “record a podcast” like we normally do but fed it some news, links and a few talking points to then generate a transcript.

Do I want all podcasts to become this?

Absolutely not.

I still want real people. I want taste, tension, disagreement, judgment, stories, obsession, timing, voice. The things that make a podcast more than a compressed briefing.

But I also have to admit something changed for me.

I will not be looking for AI-generated podcasts, but now i do understand the utility. Sometimes you just need the fastest possible way to absorb a topic while you're in the car. And apparently, an AI generated podcast episode, is a great way to do that.