Meet Simply News. It Uses AI to Automate News. And It’s Terrifying.
March 7, 2024—Have you seen Simply News? The way it uses AI to automate the process of researching, pitching, approving and writing a news podcast is mind-blowing—and terrifying.
Here are just a few of the industries this single AI service impacts:
🎤 podcasting
📰 news media
📻 radio
📣 PR
Simply News is from a company called Qurrent; I have no ties to this company, but as a former journalist turned analyst, I'm completely fascinated by what they've done.
1) Simply News's stations - covering tech, startups, politics, people and more - offer daily podcasts that range from a few minutes to up to 15 minutes in length.
2) AI agents write the podcasts and deliver them (there are even AI "correspondent" voices that join in).
3) AI agents also research story ideas and pitch them to a "judge" that decides whether the story makes it into the podcast.
If you haven't worked in journalism, that latter part is particularly impressive - and worrisome.
In most newsrooms, reporters pitch their article ideas to an editor or team of editors. The editor/s consider all the pitches and decide which stories journalists should work on.
Qurrent claims on its site that removing humans from the process of deciding what to feature "means explicit biases don't factor into the decision about what to cover." That raises all kinds of concerns about AI bias to me, however.
Another red flag? Simply News provides a list of its news sources in the show notes, but they aren't easy to find (you need to go to the Podbean page for each episode to find them). And for at least one episode that I listened to, all of the sources came from one publication: People.
The implications of Simply News for podcasters and news media are substantial. When AI agents can do all the work of finding, pitching, approving, writing and delivering the news, the impact on workforces is devastating to contemplate.
(As a side note, this sort of disruption is happening in video news too; check out Channel 1.)
It appears that Simply News is meant to be a demonstration of its parent company's technology, rather than a business in and of itself. But if it IS a business, then the other industry that is obviously impacted is advertising. US podcast ad spending was an estimated $2.3 billion industry last year, according to the IAB.
Based on this example it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which an AI-created podcast includes AI-created ads bought by AI agents.
