Podcast made with AI copies content and circulates on Spotify – 01/20/2024 – Tech

The podcast “The AI ​​Report” has been circulating on the Spotify platform since October 2023, with voices and script generated by artificial intelligence. The presentation is made by “AI reporters”.

In a report released this Friday (19), NewsGuard, a company that monitors the dissemination of synthetic content on the internet, states that the program uses generative AI similar to ChatGPT to copy journalistic content without giving credit.

In an episode published on the 29th, for example, the podcast’s virtual host, Artie Intel, reproduces, word for word, an excerpt from an article in Business Insider magazine about how humanoid robots began to enter the workforce.

The “AI reporter” does not give credit to the original source of the news or explain how he found the information.

Similar scenes are repeated throughout the program in the voice of another presenter, called Micheline Learning — a likely reference to the term “machine learning” (machine learning, in English).

Contacted by email and telephone, Spotify stated that it would not be able to respond to the Sheet this Friday (19).

Contacted by email and messages on social media, the producer responsible for the program, The Podcast Playground, did not respond as to why it did not indicate the source of the information in the episodes, nor did it detail how the production process of “The AI ​​Report” works.

News articles are part of the material available on the internet used to train large artificial intelligence models, such as ChatGPT. Therefore, there are chances that excerpts from journalistic articles are reproduced without informing who verified the information.

The podcast “The AI ​​Report” also does not mention that it is made with artificial intelligence during the audio, it only states in the program description. In other words, based on Spotify’s content recommendation algorithm, a listener can play the program without knowing this information.

In just under three months, the program published 35 episodes, whose duration varied between 3 and 15 minutes.

The program claims to be sponsored by a German organic product distributor and receives compensation for the number of reproductions — just like any podcast in the Spotify catalog.

The streaming platform does not mention special precautions for content made with artificial intelligence in its terms of use, nor in its copyright policy. Other platforms, such as TikTok, already require the identification of videos and audios produced or altered with AI.

Newsguard continuously monitors websites that disseminate disinformative content or that copy stories from other outlets. The company has already found 651 addresses that fill the internet with “synthetic debris”, as experts say.

The specialized website 404 Media showed in an article this Thursday (18) that Google News already boosts articles produced by AI with copied and uncredited material.

To the vehicle, Google said that, although it tries to eliminate spam from its news platform, it does not pay special attention to the fact that the text is produced by humans.