Soon After the Deadly Hezbollah Pager Explosions, This AI-Generated Podcast Went Up

Last week, just hours after exploding pagers and two-way radios killed dozens of people in Lebanon and injured hundreds more, a peculiar new show appeared on podcast apps. Pager Protocol isn’t about the attacks aimed at Hezbollah members or the Israeli operatives believed to be behind them. It’s an ongoing AI-generated 10-part series created to rapidly turn those unprecedented events into a fictional podcast.

Launched September 18, the day of the walkie-talkie explosions, Pager Protocol is akin to an audiobook. Each episode consists of what amounts to about a chapter, or 10 to 12 minutes, of material. In the two episodes that have dropped so far, an AI-generated narrator tells the story of the director of a fictional intelligence agency, one of his globe-trotting agents, and a CIA analyst, all of whom are hot on the trail of a large order of pagers purchased by the devious (but thinly described) Crescent Shield terrorist organization. The names of the countries involved have been changed—Tel Aviv is now Zion City, for instance—but it’s fairly easy to glean who everyone is supposed to be.

John McDermott, cofounder of Caloroga Shark Media, the company behind the podcast, calls Pager Protocol “a new pinnacle in audio storytelling,” hailing the show for the way it “combines the speed of AI integration with heart-pounding suspense.”

Caloroga Shark’s other founder, Mark Francis, says that when he read about the explosions in Lebanon, he started to have questions about how they were executed. “It had the spirit of a really intriguing story,” Francis says, “so I put the idea into Claude, which spat out an outline of a story.” The team then quickly wrote a script and “put it back into the AI for even more massaging.” Once the script was at a good place, Caloroga Shark fed it into Audiosonic and ElevenLabs for narration, created some podcast art with Ideogram, and used ChatGPT and Claude to create the episode descriptions.

“We use AI as a tool,” Francis says. “It’s not replacing anybody. It just gives us the ability to do things faster, quicker, better, and more efficiently for programming.”

While some podcast companies craft intricate pieces of audio art over months if not years, Caloroga Shark says it’s more interested in how creators can earn a return on their investment. They’ve launched numerous 10-minute-long podcasts. Most aren’t ripped from the headlines like Pager Protocol—topics range from the British royals to comedy news— but each one is about the same length, with one ad break in the middle. The aim is to put them out regularly and in volume. They use AI to work efficiently, to streamline production, and try to capture the zeitgeist faster than anyone else in the podcasting space.

Francis says that, because he’s able to turn scripts and episodes around so quickly, he can write each week’s text fairly close to the podcast’s release and incorporate many of the latest revelations about the conflict in Lebanon. “It helps me keep the story relatively real,” he says. “I don’t need to speculate 10 episodes ahead of where I am right now, not knowing what will happen in three to four weeks.”

While the idea of a quick-turnaround, generously AI-generated podcast might sound terrifying to some fans and creators, other players in the industry see it as an inevitability. Oskar Serrander, who describes his AI-meets-podcasting studio Wondercraft as “Canva for audio,” says that he views AI as a way to help creatives “produce at the speed of culture.” While he admits there are limits to AI, like the way the technology typically draws from past ideas rather than creating new concepts, he admires the way it might lower the barrier to entry for some brands or creators.

Serrander notes there are fewer podcast creators than there are OnlyFans creators. Meanwhile, there are millions of YouTube channels, and “then you’ve got TikTok and other social media channels and all those creators” competing for people’s attention. AI, he says, may lead to the “democratization of podcasts,” ultimately resulting in what he thinks could be a more interesting—and profitable—industry.

Granted, that’s not how those deeply invested in the art of podcasting see it. Jason Saldanha, chief operating officer of the nonprofit digital radio distribution company PRX, says that the creators he has worked with seem wary of AI, in part because they believe that “the real power of the medium is the host-audience relationship.” (Disclosure: PRX distributes podcasts for WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast.)

While it’s certainly tempting to use AI to translate a podcast into 20 languages and just put it out into the world, it pushes the boundaries of a work’s authenticity. “The most successful podcasts have a one-to-one relationship with their audiences, like the audiences believe they’re interacting with those people in the same room or working with them to solve some problem together,” Saldanha says. Tapping an AI voice to read the news of the day or even create a brand-new tale related to the news of the day might seem tempting to those looking to make a buck podcasting, but in the long run he thinks it’s a losing game.

“The vast majority of audio companies are run by former radio executives who, in the ’90s, ran ad loads that were close to 50 percent of the content on the air,” Saldanha explains. “That created a moment where audiences were like, ‘This is too many ads. I need an alternative,’ so they went to Napster and then Spotify.”

Now that those executives are working in digital audio, Saldanha says, they’re applying the same tactics, looking to monetize podcasts to the hilt. Doing that while also adding more podcasts to the market will devalue a premium form of content, putting the entire podcast industry in danger.

“These kinds of companies are flooding the market with content to get the lowest level of engagement, and that’s fine as a strategy, but it’s not a long-term strategy,” Saldanha says. “It’s gross and it’s bad, and, ultimately, you’re cutting off your nose just to make an extra dollar.”

Caloroga Shark doesn’t see it that way. For Francis, AI should be part of a mix of tools podcast makers use to stand out in a crowded field. Listeners “will decide which shows are worthy of staying power, whether they use AI or not,” he says. Pager Protocol may or may not be in that mix.