Being shouted down
On ethical business behavior, infinitely scalable content, and what's wrong with being first without caring whether you're doing right
James Cridland has built a reputation for anticipating changes to come in radio and related industries, a skill he puts to work in a weekly podcast called the “Podnews Weekly Review“. In a recent episode, Cridland interviewed Jeanine Wright of Inception Point AI, a company that uses artificial intelligence to synthesize AI personalities who then “host” recordings that the company feeds into podcasting directories and applications.
■ The company’s central selling point is “infinitely” scalable content -- which is to say that because they generate everything using computers rather than people, they can produce a virtually unlimited volume of new content. Cridland’s skepticism of the approach is impossible for him to mask in the course of the interview, but even without provocation, Wright unintentionally reveals a distressing ethical hollowness to the business model.
■ Wright volunteered, “[B]ecause our time to production is dramatically less and our costs of production are less, it means that we can surf trends much better than traditional podcasting organizations. So a week ago when Charlie Kirk was shot, we had content about Charlie Kirk up, we had a living biography, we had a content, and a new show about his assassination up within an hour. So when people typed Charlie Kirk into Apple and Spotify, we were three of the top five shows”.
■ Not a word about accuracy, tastefulness, tone, or service to the public. Just, in other words, “Someone famous died violently and unexpectedly and we used computers to flood the zone with material allowing us to profit from it faster than anyone else.” This is a dreadful turn of events.
■ Sensationalism and yellow journalism have been around for well over a century. But when humans do it, someone at least bears responsibility for making choices along the way. Someone’s name -- a reporter or an editor -- stands to be diminished for those times when tastelessness crosses into ghoulishness. But Wright’s model expressly rejects even the duty to put a human in the decision process: “I’m releasing 3,000 episodes a week, and I have eight people on my team. There’s no way we’re listening to the overwhelming majority of our content before it’s released.”
■ Much like rabbits, once introduced into the wild, computer-synthesized content has a way of propagating uncontrollably. It goes into the datasets that train new artificial intelligence models, and the high-volume production ensures that, like a garden weed, it has the sheer relentlessness to choke out everything else. Even death becomes merely a monetizable opportunity.
