AI Podcast Released After Israel’s Terrorist Pager Explosions in Lebanon
A new AI-generated podcast, Pager Protocol, premiered on the wake of the tragic Israeli terrorist explosions in Lebanon involving pagers and two-way radios that killed dozens and injured thousands which was the start of the Lebanon Israel war.
The timing of the podcast is unmistakable, but it does draw attention due to the connection to the podcast. The generated podcast itself does not directly tackle those Israel attacks Lebanon endured or Israeli operatives behind them. Rather, this podcast uses real-world events, transforming them in record time into an audio series of fiction capitalizing on the headlines.
Launched on September 18, the same day as the attack of the exploding electronics, Pager Protocol is a 10-part series of audio storytelling infused with AI.
In the first two episodes, an AI-generated narrator tells a story of espionage, but with such a cast as the director of a fictional intelligence agency, one of his agents, and a CIA analyst investigating a mysterious purchase of pagers by a terrorist group known as the Crescent Shield. Although the show renames real locations, such as turning Tel Aviv into Zion City, it is pretty obvious who the characters and places are supposed to be.
Israel bombing Lebanon today casts a shadow over the region, and it’s hard not to draw parallels between real-world events and the fictional espionage at the heart of this podcast.
AI’s Role in Speeding Up Content Creation
The other co-founder of Caloroga Shark, Mark Francis, says that upon reading about the electronics exploding and the Israel attack on Lebanon, he saw story potential.
“It had the spirit of a really intriguing story,” Francis says, “so I put the idea into Claude, which spit out an outline.” The team then used AI tools Audiosonic and ElevenLabs for narration, Ideogram for podcast art, and ChatGPT for episode descriptions on the Lebanon Israel war.
For Caloroga Shark, AI is simply a tool to speed up production, not an entity to replace the creators.
“It gives us the ability to do things faster, better, and more efficiently for programming,” Francis says. The company’s model is premised on releasing frequent, short, 10-minute podcasts – everything from the British royals to comedy news. With the AI, they seek to capture quicker than competitors, churning around scripts and episodes fast enough to reflect real-time developments, such as the Israel to attack Lebanon and the ongoing conflict in Israel and Lebanon.
Where others in podcasting might consider AI to erode the human touch, Francis regards it as an enhancement.
“I don’t need to speculate 10 episodes ahead,” he says, “I can keep the story relatively real.”
Is AI the Future of Podcasting?
Not everyone in the world of podcasting looks on AI-driven content with quite the same enthusiasm as Caloroga Shark. Jason Saldanha, the chief operating officer at PRX, said that the strength of podcasts lies in the organic relationship between their hosts and their audiences.
“The most successful podcasts have a one-to-one relationship with their audiences,” says Saldanha, adding that much of the time, listeners really feel like they are in the same room as the host.
The rise of AI across creative industries, like podcasting, is really a new chapter in content creation because of the unparalleled pace and speed associated with it. Such podcasts, as Pager Protocol, would perhaps appeal to an audience looking for up-tempo and topical podcasts, but there are questions of human creativity and how that fits into the future. The more companies lean on technology, the lines between authentic storytelling and machine-generated narratives will continue to blur.
Do you think the Lebanon Israel war would spark more attention on AI generated podcasts?
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