One of the Top Podcasts of the Year Is Entirely AI Generated

There is a podcast that cracked 2.8 million downloads, hit number one on Apple in the U.K. — and yet, it's entirely AI generated.

That's right — AI voices, AI script, and no vocal fry coming from human vocal cords in front of a microphone.

It wasn't quite what Adam Levy expected when he "vibe coded" the experiment in a weekend using Claude, but its since sparked his new upstart pioneering AI-generated media that seems to be attracting very real human attention.

“Other podcasters have criticized me for destroying the art of being a journalist,” Levy said. “I think those who have the better taste in curating the right angles and stories… those are the people going to win."

The podcast that's kickstarted the launch of Levy's automated content studio was "The Epstein Files" a true-crime investigative series with AI hosts ping-ponging questions, recaps, and deep-dives sourced from the trove of more than 3 million redacted documents.

"I hacked it in a matter of two days and then just published it and didn't even look back," Levy said. “No single person, no newsroom, could ever filter through 3.5 million documents."

To be sure, no human content studio would ever be able to create anything as quickly. Levy's automated process was pumping out multiple episodes a day for his series. And the episodes just kept coming. The AI ingested everything as the files were published and turned it into something consumable, along with show copy and episode images.

"I kind of had this random idea of how could I combine the data, create a content outline, create audio through it, do it in an autonomous manner. Make it source rich without any conspiracy, or talking heads — Democrat talking heads, Republican talking heads, like information without the spin — and allow people to look back at what sources were used to compile each episode," he said. "Kind of like Wikipedia meets podcasts."

Within weeks, the first episodes had racked up more than a million downloads and climbed into the top podcast charts globally. And that was even as other AI creators were also attempting the same thing. Another AI generated Epstein podcast had popped up with a 3.4-star rating. Levy's notched a 4.1 (ostensibly from human reviewers.)

"That AI slop ended up performing better than his AI slop," Levy joked, adding that for now the process does allow for personal flair. "I would argue that there's craftsmanship in that and there's a lot of intention and there's a lot of curation in that ... I do everything from a place of, 'What would I like?'"

And if this is indeed a sign of the content process to come, Levy predicts there is only one direct takeaway as AI-generated content creation gets extrapolated. “Curation is the only thing that matters,” he said.

Indeed, as a community-owned outlet, Coinage was also built in a very similar vein to allow a community of readers become co-owners in the outlet to shape its future path and coverage. As an experiment, it's also trying to push the limits of what can be achieved if more inputs are added to the content process. But should that process always involve humans?

“Historically, [in] media… the bottleneck has been the people that produce the media itself,” Levy said. “And now you can create media programmatically. And that's never been the case.”

Before "The Epstein Files" Levy spent years building Mint, a crypto-focused newsletter and podcast that scaled to over 100,000 subscribers. At one point, he was producing 40 to 60 pieces of content per week. And like most creators operating at that pace, he became a point of failure.

“I didn't like being the bottleneck of the business that I was creating,” he said.

That realization — that media businesses are often constrained by the humans behind them — became the starting point for building a content studio based entirely on leveraging AI. Now, he's working on replicating the success in other niches at his startup the Neural Broadcast Network. A second series "War Desk" focuses on the geopolitics driving order and disorder across the globe — updated with news to explore risks of global war. Other series are already in the mix.

But Levy's advice to other content creators is not to fear the technology that may seem like it could put you out of work.

“Don't be afraid of it. Embrace it… use it as a tool to enhance you," he said.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project.