Amazon Invents Another Way to Steal Media with AI-Generated Podslop

Amazon just announced Alexa Podcasts, a new Alexa+ feature available to paying Amazon Prime members. The platform allows you to ask for information on any topic and it will auto-generate an "explainer" podcast episode of any length with AI voices that are in one of their default personalities (Alexa, brief, sweet, chill, and sassy) along with its conversational style. The episode will then pull content from over 200 news sources that have "signed up" to participate, including "Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico, USA Today, and publications from Conde Nast, Hearst and Vox."

So essentially Amazon has strong-armed media partners into providing their high-quality content in order to build what is being described as a podslop generator at scale? It's no wonder the announcement is generating widespread backlash online.

The sad part is how the leadership of many of these content partners likely felt like they had no choice but to participate just so they don't get left behind. This is the reality of public pressure on media leaders right now to dive into every new AI initiative. Even the ones that are pretty clearly terrible ideas.