This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
“Democracy,” wrote H.L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” After months of people calling for the release of the Epstein Files, the US Department of Justice simply dumped millions of emails, images and videos online.
The resulting mass of information was almost impossible to comprehend, containing everything from victim testimonies to booking confirmations. It was enough to give the most tireless of investigative journalists a headache.
The Epstein Files is an attempt to curate this voluminous data. “This is not for entertainment,” chirp the hosts. “It’s a forensic audit.” Interesting. But something else is going on here — something that might not be obvious if you’re distracted during the introduction. The podcast is AI-generated. The research, the “writing” and even the narration is all AI.
This is no secret. Adam Levy, who prompted AI to create the series, has written about how The Epstein Files involved “No fancy studio. No production team. Just Claude, a Mac mini, and a weekend of focused work.” Levy wanted AI to assess the millions of documents with a level of speed and efficiency that humans could not match. “A journalist could spend years on this and still miss stuff,” he wrote. “AI doesn’t have that problem.”
The podcast is certainly a formidable piece of work. There have been almost 200 episodes — hour, after hour, after hour of audio. It has been a huge success — hitting the top 10 on Apple Podcasts series charts and earning millions of downloads.
But what is it like to listen to? Well — unsettling. The AI-generated “hosts” have a chatty conversational tone but with few of the pauses, verbal tics and digressions of human speech. It’s a constant stream of clearly articulated sentences — as if two lawyers had overdosed on Adderall. Frankly, it gave me the creeps.
The vibe never changes. The hosts have a consistent tone of brow-furrowed suspicion, as they charge from Epstein’s dubious financial background, to his crimes against young women, to his bizarre death, to singers leaving a talent agency because its owner’s name appeared in the Epstein Files. Yes, Chappell Roan leaving Wasserman is analysed in comparable detail to Epstein’s supposed suicide.
Only an idiot would deny that AI has vast potential when it comes to assessing data. Yet it is only as good as we tell it to be. It has no inherent sense of what is important; it simply responds to our input.
I don’t know if Levy had too little a sense of the structure of his series, or if he just prioritised quantity over quality, but the volume of information in The Epstein Files, and the consistent urgency with which it is presented, ends up being desensitising. We forget why we even care about Epstein. The data overwhelms our sense of perspective.
For some fans, this might almost be the point. For them, the Epstein Cinematic Universe presents an opportunity for escapism. It is a kind of parallel reality in which to lose oneself. Other listeners might genuinely benefit from the succinctness with which particular episodes in the story are described — Epstein’s initial conviction, for example, or his death in jail — but I don’t recommend bingeing The Epstein Files. It has a strange, dulling, narcotic quality.
It is not the only AI-generated podcast. Thousands are being churned out all the time. Indeed, it is becoming, and will continue to become, increasingly easy to generate one’s own podcast. “Imagine having a podcast that takes basically zero effort to create,” gushes a YouTuber in a recent video introducing her own AI-generated podcast.
A podcast that takes basically zero effort to create? Thank God! It was so damn difficult to create podcasts before. To think! One needed … a microphone … and basic recording and editing software.
Look, if someone was already using Google or spellcheck, I’m not sure they could mount a principled argument for never using AI in any circumstances. But I think the more we outsource elements of research, writing, production and editing to AI, the more limp, ersatz and ultimately forgettable our cultural output is going to be.
If nothing else, if we care about an idea, we should want to be involved in the research, writing and production. It should be, at the very least, fulfilling. If developing an idea isn’t worth our time, why should the final product be worth anyone’s time?
This feels especially unforgivable in podcasting, partly because the barriers to entry have always been so low, and partly because the appeal of podcasting, in many cases, has been its raw humanity. Cum Town remains perhaps the most beloved comedy podcast in history, and for most of the time its hosts didn’t even seem to have chairs.
Still, I’m sure we can all think of podcasts that might as well be AI-generated. “Generate a podcast between an ex-Conservative politician who is convinced of his own serene political genius and a cranky ex-spin doctor using left-wing politics to compensate for his personality problems.”
I think it could be a hit!
