Canadians Say No to AI-Generated Podcasts

What do you want, Mr. Egan? I want my life back.

On October 23rd...

The procedure is

causing troubling physical changes. What's happening to me? Look, fear.

You have to learn to control it.

In the face.

I have no idea who you are anymore.

Tell me who you want me to be. Clayface, only in theaters October 23rd.

Canadians are giving AI-generated podcasts a resounding thumbs down. Just get this, 4% say that they like these fully produced AI shows, while 68% just don't want anything to do with them. Let's talk about this with Matt Hird, Vice President of Research with Signal Hill Insights on why listeners still want a human voice and why AM and FM radio continues to dominate in-car listening. Matt, welcome to the program.

Hi, Rob. Thanks for having me on.

Well, is this simply resistance to new tech, or are listeners reacting to something maybe deeper about trust and authenticity?

I think that that is part of it. Certainly, it is an emerging technology, and not everybody has formed... solid and well thought out opinions about it quite yet. But generally speaking, when we ask folks their attitudes towards AI generated content, either music or podcasts, or in our most recent Audio on the Move study, we asked about non-audio content as well, like social media memes and blogs, online news articles. Canadians are overwhelmingly negative towards that type of content across the board.

I'm not going to trumpet AM FM. I think I'd be too biased if I did, especially on this radio station this afternoon. But I do like a real host. And even though I know that we may have differing opinions, at least I know that somebody hasn't typed in a full scale onslaught as to what I'm going to be listening to. There's an organic nature to a human voice that I just don't know if AI could generate or at least doesn't seem to be connecting with Canadians so far.

Well, I know that this is certainly the case with AMFM Radio as well, but with podcasting, there's that phenomenon of the parasocial relationship that the listeners have with the hosts. It's a building of trust, and it's one of the reasons why we still see AMFM advertising at the top of the list in terms of most trustworthy advertising. And those host read podcast ads also come across as incredibly trustworthy. It's because the listeners feel like they have a relationship with that host. And while A synthetic host, as they're called, generated by AI might be able to replace some of the information transfer that goes on. The anecdotes of the host, being able to relate to them. You're not going to have an AI-generated podcast host talk about something funny their kid did yesterday and have the audience relate to it and engage with it on that level. There's just some things that can't be replaced.

So, Matt, looking at some of the data here from Signal Hill Insights, 46% of the people that you surveyed like AMFM in their car, 27%. That's one in every four, just over one in every four, like a streaming service. The one that caught me by surprise and I'd love to talk to you about is satellite radio, Sirius in particular, at only 8%. I don't know if that's ever been higher, like maybe in the 20s or 30s, but I was surprised that satellite