In 2021, while speaking with Zachariah Moreno and Rock Felder the co-founders of SquadCast.fm by Descript on my podcast, (episode here), I floated a prediction: “within a few years, we could have fully AI-based podcasts with AI hosts interviewing AI guests.” At the time, it felt like a natural evolution of AI-generated audio. Today, as companies like Inception Point AI produce 3,000 AI-generated podcast episodes per week at $1 per episode, I reflect more solemnly that just because we can automate human conversation doesn’t mean we should.

The appeal is undeniable. Why pay hosts or guests when you can create synthetic personalities who never demand raises, never have off days, and can produce content around the clock?

However, we see similar debates happening across voice over talent in film, television and video games. Similarly, Google has embraced this philosophy wholeheartedly, rapidly shifting its advertising focus toward AI-generated content. Why waste time on human creativity when algorithms can generate ads faster and cheaper?

But in our rush toward efficiency, we’re systematically dismantling something irreplaceable: the messy, unpredictable, deeply human art of difficult conversation.

The Monetization of AI-Generated Audio

What we’re witnessing is the commoditization of human discourse. When Inception Point AI boasts about achieving profitability with just 20 listeners per episode, they’re not celebrating innovation; they’re announcing the successful monetization of content pollution. Their model treats conversation as a product to be manufactured at scale, optimized for SEO keywords like “Whales” rather than genuine human curiosity or connection.

This isn’t about dismissing AI as “slop,” as some critics do. The technology itself is remarkable. The problem lies in how we’re choosing to deploy it. We’re using AI to replace the very conversations that make us human, rather than enhancing our capacity for meaningful dialogue.

Consider what happens when we automate away the friction of human conversation. When AI hosts never stumble over words, never ask unexpected follow-up questions, and never challenge guests in ways that create genuine discomfort, we lose the spontaneous moments where real insight emerges. The pregnant pause before a complicated answer. The nervous laugh that reveals a hidden truth. The moment when someone changes their mind mid-sentence because they’ve been truly heard.

How AI-Generated Audio Kills Difficult Conversations

Human conversation at its best is inefficient by design. It meanders. It gets uncomfortable. It forces us to confront ideas we’d rather avoid and perspectives that challenge our assumptions. These are features that make conversation transformative rather than merely informative.

AI-generated content, no matter how sophisticated, operates from a fundamentally different premise. It seeks to satisfy rather than challenge, to confirm rather than confront, to optimize for engagement metrics rather than genuine understanding. When Inception Point AI’s CTO William Corbin says he won’t “create a personality that somebody has a deep relationship with,” he’s acknowledging a crucial limitation: AI can simulate conversation, but it cannot participate in the vulnerable exchange that defines authentic human connection.

The danger is that AI will replace just enough of our conversations to atrophy our collective capacity for complex dialogue. As we grow accustomed to frictionless, optimized content, we may lose our tolerance for the messiness of real human exchange. We risk creating a generation that expects conversation to be as smooth and predictable as a well-tuned algorithm.

The Economic Trap

The economics driving this shift are seductive but shortsighted. Yes, AI can produce content for pennies compared to human creators. But this race to the bottom in production costs ignores the true value proposition of human conversation: its ability to generate insights that couldn’t be programmed, planned, or predicted.

When Google automates ad creation, they’re not just cutting costs. They’re homogenizing communication. When podcast networks flood the zone with AI-generated content, they’re not just scaling production. They’re diluting the medium itself. The result is a content ecosystem optimized for volume over value, reach over resonance.

This economic model treats audience attention as a resource to be harvested rather than a relationship to be cultivated and nurtured. It reduces conversation to a transaction: input keywords, output content, measure downloads, optimize for profit. But human conversation operates by entirely different rules. Its value lies not in efficiency but in inefficiency, not in predictability but in surprise, not in optimization but in exploration.

The Rise of ElevenLabs and the AI-Generated Audio Boom

ElevenLabs is at the center of the AI-Generated Audio surge. With a recent $6.6 billion valuation and more than $200 million in annual recurring revenue, the company has become one of the most influential players in synthetic audio. Its technology powers customer support systems, gaming platforms, educational tools, and even enterprise scheduling.

But the company is no longer just focused on text-to-speech. ElevenLabs is pushing into AI-generated music and conversational agents at scale. Its Agents Platform already supports over two million AI voice bots across apps, websites, and phone systems. While this demonstrates investor confidence and industry adoption, it also highlights the rapid pace at which AI-generated audio is infiltrating spaces once reserved for genuine human expression.

Yet as the company’s expressive models generate lifelike speech and even mimic cultural styles of artists, questions about ethics, training data, and authenticity remain unresolved. The lawsuits against similar music-generation startups underscore the potential risks of treating creativity as just another dataset to optimize.

AI Voice in Call Centers: Escaping Difficult Conversations

The call center industry has become one of the most extensive testing grounds for AI Voice. Companies are turning to synthetic audio agents not just to cut costs, but also to deflect the most challenging part of customer service: handling real human conflict.

An AI agent never gets tired, never raises its voice, and never loses patience. For executives, that sounds like efficiency. For customers, it often feels like avoidance. When every “press one for support” leads to another AI voice, the relationship becomes transactional instead of personal.

It’s no accident that Discover’s latest marketing emphasizes the opposite. Their campaign tagline, “Treating people special is kind of our thing,” spotlights the very human connection other companies are phasing out. By promising “You can speak with a real person,” Discover is betting that authenticity will become a competitive advantage in a market flooded with AI voices.

The danger is that as call centers embrace AI-generated audio, customers may begin to lose tolerance for the frustrations of honest conversations. Conflict and empathy might be seen as inefficiencies to automate away, rather than opportunities to build trust.

Why I’m Returning to the Mic

I’ve been podcasting in one form or another for a decade. My first podcast launched in January 2015, followed by a successful show I built while at Google, and then my own show in 2023. After that, I stepped back for a year, telling myself I needed a mental break and room to pursue other opportunities. In reality, I found that having meaningful conversations, even for myself, was becoming harder.

But over the past year, as AI has reshaped how we communicate, I’ve realized something important: conversations are essential. That’s why I’m excited to announce the relaunch of The Chris Hood Show. The new season will dive deeper into AI’s real impact, but it will also spotlight what matters most: human connection, human relationships, and human conversations.

Expect episodes that are unscripted, unfiltered, and unapologetically human. We’ll tackle the questions algorithms can’t answer, the challenges that require lived expertise, and the messy, uncomfortable exchanges that create real insight. Guests will disagree. Ideas will clash. And together we’ll navigate the uncomfortable spaces between hype and reality, exploring how technology is shaping, and sometimes straining, the fabric of our lives.

Beyond AI-Generated Audio

I’m not arguing for a wholesale rejection of AI in media and communication. The technology has legitimate applications that can enhance human creativity and reach. But we must resist the temptation to automate away the very conversations that make us human.

I have often advocated for a simple line of questioning. “Should AI do this?” “Do our customers want it?” “Does this solve our problems, or our customers?”

The future doesn’t have to be a choice between human inefficiency and algorithmic optimization. We can use AI to amplify human conversation rather than replace it. We can leverage technology to facilitate difficult discussions rather than smooth them away. We can choose depth over volume, connection over content, understanding over optimization.

But only if we’re willing to have the difficult conversations about what we’re losing when we let algorithms speak for us. Only if we recognize that some things, like genuine human connection, shouldn’t be optimized, monetized, or automated away.

That’s a conversation worth having. And worth having badly, messily, and entirely without optimization. It’s a conversation that demands not artificial intelligence, but authentic humanity.

And it’s precisely the kind of conversation you’ll find on The Chris Hood Show.

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Chris Hood is an AI strategist and author of the #1 Amazon Best Seller “Infailible” and “Customer Transformation,” and has been recognized as one of the Top 40 Global Gurus for Customer Experience.