AI Slop Podcasts?

My kid likes listening to podcasts sometimes and it’s cool with me! Story Pirates, for example, rules. She must have typed in “Bluey” at some point into the podcast app we use and found the Bluey Storytime Podcast.

It looks kind of official. That’s real Bluey art, it uses the word “Bluey” in the title, in the real Bluey typeface and everything. But then it gets stranger. There is no real intro or outro, no sense of who is doing this podcast and why, and no ads. It’s like if an episode of Bluey was first turned into a short book, and then a voice just reads the book. That feels off to me. Like it doesn’t feel high quality enough for it to be official, and if it’s not official, wouldn’t copyright laws apply? Doesn’t Disney distribute Bluey? Isn’t Disney famously litigious?

But hey the kid likes it. It doesn’t have any of the charm of the show at all, but it reminds you how charming the show was when you watched it for real. Weird.

The more I listened to it, it occurred to me that the voice might not be “real”. It was pretty good sounding, but it didn’t quite feel real. The cadence of the talking, for example, was too perfect.

I’m not 100% sure though, and digging slightly deeper leads different directions. For instance, looking at reviews of the podcast make me think those reviews are just AI slop as well.

I know allowing people to type whatever they want onto the public internet doesn’t usually go well but looking at these reviews make me wonder if society is going illiterate (uh oh — I’m getting old).

This is all making me feel like this show is AI generated slop. “Slop” meaning extremely low effort. Someone downloaded a video of the Bluey episode and fed it to the right LLM with the right prompt, got a script, had the script read, and called it a podcast. Someone pointed me to Eleven Labs as a likely source of the good quality voice.

But digging in a different direction goes the other way. The creator is listed as “ForRealLife” which is cute and clever and feels human to me. It doesn’t link anywhere, but if you Google it you can find this other Bluey podcast:

Two ladies talking here, which feels a bit more human. I listened to a few with my pre-primed AI-skeptic brain. I was feeling like the pleasantries they exchanged seemed so brief and generic and I immediately thought it could be generated.

Google’s NotebookLM was making headlines not along ago for the admittedly impressive feature where it basically produces a podcast of two people talking about a subject. Could it be?

I don’t think so, I’m afraid. The search also yielded an Instagram account in which Cherin & Tori are actually clearly two real life mom friends:

While I’m sure there are AI slop podcasts out there, I don’t think I discovered one here. I think Cherin & Tori are actually just fans of Bluey and enjoy making content around it. And have really nice voices for it.

It’s my own too-online broken-ass skeptical brain that is making me question more than I need to, apparently.