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What’s It Like to Cohost a Podcast With AI? One Creator Is Finding Out
The new comedy show reveals serious truths about working beyond human
For roughly the past year, I’ve been exploring podcasting with Faithful on the Clock, my show for Christian professionals. I really knew nothing about producing a show when I started — I just wanted to try to get a good message to people. But I knew that podcasts are wildly popular, and I started to understand just how quirky the industry can be: I read just last week how podcasters on Spotify are raking in $18,000 per month with white noise shows. (Makes sense, I guess, given that people are stressed, tired, distracted, and looking for anything and everything to help themselves relax.)
Then I got an email about a completely new show, Late Night with Robot. One cohost is a completely normal human being, Ana-Marija Stojic. The other? An artificial intelligence bot. Stojic spends the whole show talking to the machine, which manifests both real and imagined personalities (e.g., Donald Trump). The results are both unexpected and funny. I couldn’t help but wonder what in the world it meant for podcasting as a whole, so I emailed Stojic and asked.
A new show with old roots and big power
Unlike some great ideas creators have, the idea for Late Night wasn’t just a random noodle spiral that suddenly manifested in Stojic’s brain. She told me she’s always been fascinated by AI technology, even talking to Smarterchild (an early MSN AI precursor to Siri and Alexa) by the hour just because she was curious about how the AI worked.
So although Stojic’s show definitely has a comedic approach, she points out that it’s also a serious, intimate way to explore what working with an AI can look like, which has massive implications for just about every industry. Each episode has a “debrief” that gives listeners a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like for Stojic to work with a specific personality via the bot. People also can ask the show’s AI technician, Alan Majer, any questions they have about AI technology and bots. Education and entertainment always are married in each show.
One of the biggest fascinations for Stojic with the project is that AI has the…
