Bill Simmons built a media empire on the sound of friends arguing. Now, according to a New York Times report, some of those friends are getting tired of one particular argument: the one about artificial intelligence.
The Ringer founder, whose sprawling podcast network turns basketball trades, movie rankings and gambling grudges into hours of weekly audio, has increasingly folded A.I. into his shows u2014 riffing on chatbots, floating A.I.-generated bits and testing what the technology can do with the kind of sports-media minutiae he has spent decades cataloging. The habit has become recurring enough that his regular co-hosts have started pushing back on air.
That friction is, in one sense, the format working as designed. Simmons’s podcasts have always run on the rhythm of a host who won’t let a topic go and a rotating cast of colleagues willing to tell him he’s wrong. The A.I. material simply gives them a new thing to groan about. But the tension also reflects something broader happening across the media business, where enthusiasm for generative tools at the executive level frequently collides with skepticism, and outright anxiety, among the writers, producers and on-air talent whose work the tools are trained on and, potentially, could replace.
For podcasters in particular, the stakes are unusually personal. Voice cloning has advanced to the point where a convincing synthetic version of a familiar host is trivial to produce. Audio is also comparatively cheap for A.I. companies to generate and distribute, which makes talk shows an obvious target for automation experiments. A host who plays with those tools on his own show is, depending on your view, either demystifying them or handing over the keys.
Simmons has never been shy about chasing the next distribution shift. He was early to podcasting itself, built Grantland into a writers’ showcase at ESPN, then launched The Ringer and sold it to Spotify in 2020 in a deal reported at roughly u00a4200 million u2014 a bet that audio, not text, was where sports and pop-culture commentary would live. He has since become one of Spotify’s most visible podcast figures, and his instinct to poke at emerging technology on air fits a long pattern of treating his own shows as a live laboratory.
His co-hosts, many of them longtime collaborators who followed him from Grantland to The Ringer, occupy a different position. They are the labor, not the ownership. Their skepticism on air reads less like Luddism than like people doing quick math about what a machine that can imitate banter means for a career built on banter.
The on-mic bickering is unlikely to change much. Simmons’s shows thrive on unresolved disagreement, and a running gag about the boss’s A.I. phase is good content. But the exchange captures a real divide in an industry still deciding how much of itself to hand to the software u2014 and it is telling that the argument is happening in public, at conversational length, on the very medium most exposed to being synthesized.
For listeners, the effect is a familiar one: a podcast about basketball and movies that keeps drifting, almost against its will, into a referendum on the future of the people making it. Read More
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