Lead Balloon Ep. 73 - AI Podcasts Scrapped: Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright Explains Pivot, Rebrand as Liquid Studios
Was it a tech industry PR stunt? A failed business model?
As they promote their new AI technologies, executives at tech startups have said some outlandish things.
Making bold claims gets headlines. It secures meetings. It closes funding deals.
It also runs the risk of being seen as manipulative, insincere and opaque.
So in this episode, we have a big update to the story of Inception Point AI.
This startup burst onto the scene a year ago using AI podcast hosts to produce 3,000 episodes a week of fully synthetic content.
We'll speak with CEO Jeanine Wright herself to confirm that the company has pivoted its business model and spun off a B2B brand as Liquid Studios, an AI-driven "content transformation" engine.
She tells us that Inception Point's AI podcast feeds have mostly been abandoned, and that monetization of fully-synthetic, human-like content is no longer a revenue source for the company.
But we're also going to have some uncomfortable conversation about how we got here, because many of us in the podcast industry are still pretty peeved about this story.
Inception Point told us they were going to revolutionize podcasting by replacing human hosts with AI. Most of us didn't like that.
Now they're quietly backing away from that business model and that brand, and they claim that the business was always intended as a B2B platform for enterprises to adapt their content at-scale.
So was it all a publicity stunt? Did the backlash hit home?
Can we trust anything that tech CEOs say in 2026?
We'll discuss all this with Jeanine, as well as
Award-winning podcast host Ronald Young, Jr. (Weight For It, Pop Culture Happy Hour)
Dr. Jeremy Morris, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin
We edit all our podcast interviews to optimize the story for listeners and provide context and commentary. This episode is no exception.
In the name of fairness and full transparency, we are also sharing the uncut video of the interview with Jeanine Wright so that you can decide whether our coverage of this issue is fair or not.
If you like, you can view that uncut version here: https://youtu.be/F-BTnjIV81M
Episode Transcript:
Dusty Weis
Ronald Young Jr. How are you doing, man?
Ronald Young Jr.
Dusty Weis. Good to see you.
Dusty Weis
Likewise. How you been? Whatcha been up to?
Ronald Young Jr.
Working hard man. Working hard. I'm working on a new show, I haven’t really announced it publicly yet.
Dusty Weis
Oh, you want to do it here?
Ronald Young Jr.
No.
Dusty Weis
Let's break some news, man. We're gonna be breaking some news today. Might as well do this one, too.
Ronald Young Jr.
Not quite yet.
Dusty Weis
If you’re a regular listener to the show, you’ll recognize Ronald Young Junior as the award-winning host of the podcast “Weight for It,” a contributor to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, and the winner of Best Podcast Host at the Podcast Academy Awards.
He is, simply put, one of the best podcast hosts in the business.
And we brought him back because we have an update to an episode we did about a year ago about AI-generated podcast hosts.
By the way, you won’t need to have heard that episode to appreciate this one.
But the big news is, we’re also going to have a long, uncomfortable talk with Jeanine Wright, the CEO of the company behind this AI technology.
Ronald Young Jr.
I'm very much looking forward to this conversation, just to be informed about what the heck you're talking about.
Dusty Weis
Good, because we have some pretty big follow up news to the conversation that you and I had a year ago. So let's recap that conversation real quick. I see the eyes rolling here.
Ronald Young Jr.
Because I'm already upset with you for dragging me back into this.
Dusty Weis
You and I and a lot of the podcast industry, we were feeling pretty peeved about a year ago. You remember what that was all about?
Ronald Young Jr.
Yes. There was like the, Inception Point was talking about making thousands of podcasts with AI hosts, creating a bunch of AI slop and a bunch of AI podcasts, and they were building a business model on top of that.
Dusty Weis
And those of us who make our living in this space, we were unhappy about that for a variety of reasons. Human creativity is not something that can be fabricated by an LLM. And who wants to listen to that anyways?
But there's also a limited pool of advertising dollars, and we're already fighting over it. And now we have to fight robots for it too. There was a whole lot to be upset about there.
Well, here Ronald Young Jr, is the update that I wanted to share, because I'm going to be speaking on a panel this month about this very topic.
And so I just popped over to Inception Point AI's website to see what's up. And Inception Point AI no longer exists.
Ronald Young Jr.
What?
Dusty Weis
They have rebranded, Ron. They have rebranded, after less than a year, as Liquid Studios.
But Ron, wait, there's more. Because Liquid Studios bills itself as a “content transformation infrastructure.” I'm quoting from the website here. “Managed infrastructure that turns the catalog you already own into video, audio and short form.”
“No regenerating, no rebuilding.” And further, Ron, they appear to have abandoned or be in the process of abandoning their AI-generated podcast content business model.
Ronald Young Jr.
I'll bet you wasn’t it from outrage. I bet it was from the fact that it wasn't sustainable. You have to look at the numbers and say, what were the advertisers looking at in terms of the return on the investment? And it had to be remarkably low, even if they're only spending pennies to get it. Who's actually listening to the stuff?
Dusty Weis
A dollar per episode. But if you're only getting 20 listens per episode, that math just doesn’t math.
Ronald Young Jr.
It couldn't have been.
Dusty Weis
So I clicked a little bit deeper into the website, and the quote that really jumps out at me is “together we built the Quiet Please Podcast Network, the world's largest independent podcast network by show count,” which, great stat.
Ronald Young Jr.
Okay, that's not, no one counts that as a metric. What are you doing?
Dusty Weis
“Thousands of shows, thousands of new episodes every week. More than 10 million listeners,” uh huh, “each episode produced for around a dollar. But that network was never the destination. It was the proof that content infrastructure works at this scale in production under real economics.”
So in other words, Ron, when Jeanine Wright, the CEO of Inception Point AI now Liquid Studios, went up on stage at conferences when she went on her LinkedIn and swore up and down that “AI people” were going to be the next generation of social media and podcast stars, either she was lying through her teeth…
Ronald Young Jr.
Correct.
Dusty Weis
… Or they had to completely abandon what every single rational person in the industry tried to tell them was an unsustainable business model, and they are now lying through their teeth about that.
Ronald Young Jr.
I mean, they're probably both.
You need to get Pablo Torre on this. You need to get Pablo Torre Finds Out on this. Because I want answers.
It's not surprising to see a company pivot. Companies pivot all the time.
In the year that you’ve known me, I would last year, I was like, I don't really use an AI like that this year. I don't use it to create anything. But in terms of I was making a spreadsheet and I'm like, I want this spreadsheet to be a little bit more efficient.
Definitely use AI to make my spreadsheet more efficient.
Dusty Weis
Heck yeah, two thumbs up.
Ronald Young Jr.
Yes, help my one sheet look better. It's not putting the creator out of business, it's actually allowing me to expand beyond just making, writing and putting it out.
So there's ways in which AI can help shorten those, but it shortens it in a way that a Google search and some deep research and having templates would also help you, right?
Dusty Weis
It's making the creator more efficient, not replacing the creator. And that seems to be what Liquid Studios now claims that they have always been about.
Ronald Young Jr.
That's not true.
Dusty Weis
They seem to have stuck a finger up, sensed the direction the wind is blowing and been like, oh, we can blow that way.
Ronald Young Jr.
I don't believe it. I yeah, I think if anything that the company just blows generally. That's what it feels like to me.
Dusty Weis
There's your mic drop. Boom. Theme music. Welcome to Lead Balloon! Here we go!
I'm Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about important tales from the worlds of PR, marketing and branding told by the well-meaning communications professionals who live them.
Oh, that was perfect.
Ronald Young Jr.
Yeah man.
Dusty Weis
It's like we scripted that.
Ron, I think so much is unreported here. Pablo Torre seems busy. I think there's actually only one thing left to do.
I've got to reach out to Jeanine herself and see if she'll actually come on the show this time.
Ronald Young Jr.
Do it.
Dusty Weis
Okay. So.
Jeanine Wright did agree to talk to us this time around.
We cleared some things up. Sort of.
Inception Point AI still technically exists as the parent company of Liquid Studios.
They have mostly moved on from their business model of synthesizing AI-generated podcasts. Most of those have gone dark. A few of them are still publishing. But she says they’re no longer even trying to monetize these via ad revenue.
And of the five corporate officers who were listed on the old website, only two are listed on the new website. Jeanine is one of them, she says that one of those former corporate officers remains as a strategic advisor. And two are no longer with the company—she will not say why.
You’ll hear in the conversation that she seems intentionally vague about the reason for the pivot from B2C to B2B.
So from this I am led to speculate that someone, either leadership at the company or the venture backers, lost faith in the business model of generating ad revenue off of consumer-targeted AI podcast content.
We have to arrive at our own conclusions about that.
Because even in the same breath where she still defends the old business model, she’s also now saying that this was always the plan, to go B2B.
Lastly, it’s not often we do an adversarial interview on this show. Jeanine and I talked for a really long time and I’m going to have to make some editing decisions to keep this conversation interesting for you. So if you want to watch the whole conversation, uncut, uninterrupted by commentary, and decide for yourself if I’m being fair or not, it’ll be on the Podcamp Media YouTube page. You can have at it and let me know what you think.
Finally, I have to call out that when I was starting out as a nobody in this business years ago, and I’m not claiming to be a “somebody” now but, Jeanine Wright once did something very kind for me. Jeanine, by the way, is a “somebody.” She is a longstanding figure in the podcast industry. When we first met, she was an executive at Amazon’s former podcast division, Wondery; she co-founded Simplecast, a podcast distribution and monetization platform.
And in spite of all the vagaries or misleading statements or inflammatory statements, I don’t think Jeanine Wright is a bad person. I think she’s a person trying to get ahead in a bad system. And we’ll discuss more about that later as well.
But, when I spoke to Jeanine Wright, I started by asking her about the new Liquid Studios business model.
Jeanine Wright
Liquid Studios is our B2B brand, so we haven't changed the name of the company. The company is still Inception Point AI, but Liquid Studios is the name under which we serve clients who are media companies, large creators, publishers.
It’s this idea that in the future, the way that content is made is that a creator gets to come up with the idea, the story that they want to tell, the message they want to deliver to the world, and they pick that first way that that idea is going to be born into the world, whether it's a, you know, a newsletter or a podcast or a book or a vlog or whatever it is, the thing that they're passionate about making.
But the end user gets to decide how they receive it. And the whole infrastructure for that is the infrastructure that we're building. So the creator spends more of their time on their creative passion and less of their time trying to make it available everywhere.
Dusty Weis
Now you say it's the infrastructure that you are building. This is something that you've been proving out over the last few months. But have you actually taken on clients? Are you bringing in revenue with this business model yet?
Jeanine Wright
Well, actually, I mean, so and I think maybe this was where there was some confusion as to what we were doing in the space over the last year and a half. I think people perceived us as building a media company, and we were certainly making content. We were making AI generated characters, we were making audio, we were making video, content for social media.
But we have always been a tech company. We've raised money as a tech company. We have a tech company vision, and it was always our vision to continue to make our own content, but to serve third parties as well. And we had built that into our plan to start serving these third-party customers, you know, about the middle of this year.
And that's when we really got started in doing that business. But all of the work that we've been doing for the last year and a half positioned us to be able to do this really well for the customers that we have now.
Dusty Weis
And you made a lot of news with the Inception Point business model. A lot of headlines centered on that and these fully synthetic podcast hosts. Is that still part of the business model?
Jeanine Wright
Yeah. So we definitely have people who are hiring us to create synthetic hosts for them. We have folks who are hiring us to digitally recreate themselves.
Dusty Weis
A lot of the original business model, and certainly what got a lot of the headlines was the Quiet Please network. And I was poking around on there, and it seems like a lot of those podcast feeds have gone silent these past few months. Is Quiet Please winding down as you sort of move into these new spaces and B2B?
Jeanine Wright
The honest answer is I don't know. Not necessarily. Not sure I would describe it as winding down. A few months ago, we went to talk to our investors and our board to essentially share that we had gotten to the point where we're operating two different companies, right?
We were needing to support all of this content that we were creating, and if we wanted to continue to create it, and if we wanted to really move into efforts to effectively monetize it, what kind of infrastructure do we need to build internally in order to monetize and continue to publish this kind of content at scale?
And we were also building this burgeoning B2B business. And so, if we were going to try and do two things at once, we really needed to have two teams dedicated to those efforts, or we needed to pick where we were going to strategically focus. And the B2B side of the business is the side of the business I think with the greater potential, you know, it has certainly these days, like the better likelihood of longer-term success, finding an exit, etc..
And so, you know, it was my strategic recommendation to our board and to our investors that we focus on the B2B side of the business. And they agreed.
And so in order to do that, we needed to significantly pair back the amount of content that we were managing so that we could focus the resources of my team on the B2B opportunity.
So at one point, we were producing north of 15,000 active shows. You know, we're talking thousands of podcast episodes a week, dozens of active creators that we had developed and that we were managing YouTube channels and social media presences for. And so we've rolled back much of that.
You know, at this point, we probably have maybe 300 active shows, but we're not making any efforts to monetize the content or anything.
It's really just this is kind of a sandbox and a showcase. We play and design new stuff so that we can learn on ourselves instead of learning on our customers.
Dusty Weis
So I think we can read between the lines of what Jeanine has said so far here, that Inception Point's business pivot is a result of the need to demonstrate profitability to investors. I went poking through the official Quiet Please network feed, and I couldn't find evidence that they're continuing to publish 300 shows.
I could honestly only find like 2 or 3, like this show blatantly attempting to hijack search traffic for Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast.
Football Brothers
Welcome back to Football Brothers, the show where sibling rivalry meets gridiron glory, and every week hits like a two-minute drill with the clock melting away. I am Marvelous Marty Sinclair, and yes, I'm AI.
Dusty Weis
By the way that little glitch in the AI voice there? That’s not my editing. That’s how they posted it to their feed. And then there’s this show.
Space Cowboy
Howdy, listeners. This is the Space Cowboy saddling up once again at the edge of the cosmic corral to talk about the James Webb Space Telescope and what it has been rustling up in the sky lately.
Dusty Weis
What I found a lot more of were feeds that seemed to have been abandoned abruptly, including their signature program Biography Flash, which had posted regular, lifted-from-the-tabloids updates about prominent celebrities like Oprah and Michael J. Fox.
Biography Flash
Welcome to Biography Flash from Quiet Please podcast networks.
Dusty Weis
And Ronald Young had thoughts when I told him about the manner in which Biography Flash: Dolly Parton was decommissioned.
Ronald Young Jr.
Okay, I'll leave. I'll leave Dusty.
Dusty Weis
The last episode dropped on August 22nd.
Biography Flash
Dolly Parton has had a remarkably eventful few days.
Dusty Weis
Talking about her health, talking about her coming back. And it ends with the catch-all phrase that we all put in our podcast.
Biography Flash
And be sure to subscribe so you never miss an update on Dolly Parton.
Dusty Weis
That was August 22nd. There's been no update since then. She passed away three days later.
Biography Flash
This has been a Quiet Please production.
Ronald Young Jr.
I just yeah, I was about to say, just give me the day she died. I know where this is going.
Dusty Weis
Don't miss that update.
Ronald Young Jr.
Yeah. This is like such nonsense. And I mean, at this point and one thing I don't like about podcasting in our industry is that whenever somebody does something wrong, I don't think we spend enough time roasting them out of the industry.
Dusty Weis
No we do not.
Ronald Young Jr.
We really don't.
Dusty Weis
Because it's a very ephemeral medium. And I get that. But like, doing stuff like this needs to have lasting repercussions.
Ronald Young Jr.
Yes. And I feel like part of it is saying the Podcast Show, Podcast Movement, Tribeca, Resonate, all of the conferences should all be saying we don't let people like this on our stages. We don't let them come in. We don't let them talk about nothing. They can't pay us enough money for us to support them at all.
And they all have to stand tall on that. On Air Fest, all of them. They have to stand tall and say, “we're not just going to take everybody.”
Unless you're going to bring Jeanine right in to have a Michel Martin or someone come in and give her the actual interview that we want to hear, which is, “Hey, why do you keep doing this? This all feels like lies. Why are you lying?”
Like, unless that's what you're going to do. Otherwise, stop giving them platforms that they can continue to try to make business to suckers who might actually buy what they're selling.
Dusty Weis
Jeanine Wright, however, disputes the characterization that Inception Point’s AI hosted podcasts were put out of their misery.
Jeanine Wright
I don't think that that business model wasn't profitable. I think that somebody is going to do that business is going to do it quite well, and we are supporting some of the companies that we work with to leverage that same business model and to make content and make money doing that content.
We just had two different paths and decided to pick the path that resonated most with us. That seemed like the even bigger opportunity, right?
I mean, we're a VC backed company, and we raised money under certain expectations as to what kind of company we were going to build and what the company's trajectory was going to look like. And this path was more consistent with that path.
Dusty Weis
But what also remains unclear is what Liquid Studios is doing to differentiate itself from the other services in the market that use AI to repurpose content—services like Riverside, Headliner and Descript.
Jeremy Morris is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin, my alma mater, where Jeremy and I are actually speaking on a panel together about this.
He directs the university's research lab for studying the interaction of AI, media, and society, and he has been following the rise of synthetic media in music and podcasting very closely. And he says that he's still waiting for Inception Point to explain what exactly their new business model is.
Jeremy Morris
If they have, it's not on their website. And I don't know if this is because there was such a strong reaction to Inception Point AI from the podcasting community, but the website is more full of business jargon than I'm used to dealing with in my everyday career, and I don't know if it's more common in your like marketing world. But, it is really actually a little bit difficult to even parse what they're sort of saying that they're going to be doing.
So between that and comparing that to other companies, I'm not seeing where they think they're going to distinguish themselves. They are doing a lot of things that services do offer. Right. You and I just talked for 20 minutes here, right, let's cut out the 20 seconds where one of us said something inflammatory, and then we'll send it around and see if it goes viral.
There are companies that do that, right? There are companies that would take this and translate it into multiple languages in multiple markets. I think maybe what they're trying to offer is that whole stack approach that we can do all of these things, and maybe the other companies that are currently doing it are sort of specializing in one particular area or another, but they are making a big play on this scale of this…
If you have a massive set of archives, then that's where we are going to shine.
Dusty Weis
Yeah, certainly. And I have poked around their website and you are absolutely dead bang on right there. It is very jargony, almost to the point where I'm 99% sure that it was just written by AI itself, which, okay, at least they're putting their money where their mouth is.
But it seems like this rebrand is something that has happened with very little fanfare and very little specificity, and leads me to believe that they're kind of sneaking away from what they were doing before and just trying to get a clean break and become something else.
Jeremy Morris
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't disagree in the sense that the reaction to the company was pretty strong, at least from podcasters and those invested in kind of like how are podcasters going to be making a living going forward.
There may have been some support from, I think, in one of your previous episodes you mentioned, you know, like venture capitalists were excited by the idea because it's like, oh, here's a potentially profitable way to think about podcasting going forward.
But I do think that they raised enough ire and frustration that maybe their name in podcasting was it's, you know, it's a difficult brand name to work with if you're going to stay in that market.
And so I think the switch to Liquid Audio or Liquid Studio, sorry, is an acknowledgment that, yeah, we need to rebrand this thing. We need to move away from that.
Dusty Weis
So is the Inception Point brand damaged, or have Jeanine Wright's efforts to hype up the possibilities of AI generated podcast hosts gone too far over the last year? She doesn't think so.
Jeanine Wright
I don't pretend to have all of the right answers. And so I invite the conversation. I mean, I think you probably know I don't shy away from saying bold things. I don't shy away from invitations to appear on podcasts or to appear at events to talk about things that I know are going to be disruptive or controversial.
I've tried to say yes to everything that I could say yes to that didn't involve some kind of very significant time commitment or travel commitment.
And some of those conversations were really tough, right? Some people were really upset. One person, the very first thing they called me the Antichrist.
I think that there is a very loud vocal minority who at this point, you know, continues to dislike what it is that we're doing or have done.
But most of my conversations now, the tenor and tone of the conversations has radically changed. And the podcast show in London was a fantastic example of that, because I, on the stage, took a lot of negative feedback, right? Like people, somebody stood up and said that they thought that what I was building was, I think she said, an abomination and an insult to creators everywhere.
You know, at one point, people booed.
Dusty Weis
And you think that that's a minority in the podcast community?
Jeanine Wright
So then I got off the stage and people were waiting in line for more than an hour to speak to me, and not one of them was negative. And I get a lot less of the negative sentiment than I used to get.
Dusty Weis
I'm going to use a word that I know that you don't care for, but I'll throw it out there anyways because it's just the quickest, easiest way to refer to it: slop.
And I would argue that… and again, maybe out in the Bay area that there is less backlash to slop. But in the rest of America right now, and in a lot of the world, there was a certain novelty to AI-synthesized media when it first came out.
And now I don't think that there's a ton of enthusiasm that's out there for it. I think that there are people that see it...
Jeanine Wright
What do you think slop is? What do you define as slop?
Dusty Weis
Well, you're an attorney. And so you're going to be able to tell me the name of the Supreme Court justice that I'm quoting here, because I can't bring it to mind, but “I know it when I see it.” And I think you know it when you see it too.
Jeanine Wright
The porn definition.
Dusty Weis
That's the one.
Jeanine Wright
Maybe. Yeah, maybe you do. I mean, I think that slop is the folks who are using, I don't know, there's a very little creative inspiration behind the process, and they're using AI tools to make as much content as they can with as little expense as possible, in order to be able to monetize the delta.
Dusty Weis
But wasn’t that the original business model at Inception Point AI? 350,000 episodes is a lot, and there was not always human in the loop in that.
Jeanine Wright
But so do you think that something has to have human in the loop in order to not be slop?
Dusty Weis
I think that when you originally described the business model, you drew two distinctions at the time, and I thought that they were two very interesting distinctions. Because you identified a business goal of Inception Point AI as serving underserved niches that are otherwise unprofitable. Ski reports for very localized areas, weather reports, things like that.
Look, man, I had a NOAA weather radio when I was an eight year old kid. Getting my weather forecast from a robot is nothing new to me. That serves a function.
But as someone who makes his living in the podcast ecosystem, I have a concern if someone who's never listened to a podcast before, or even someone who's been listening to podcasts for their entire life, pulls out their phone, flips into Apple Podcasts, and searches for something that they're passionate about. And the first thing that comes up is a show that was generated by an AI. They click it and they listen to it and they say, “Oh, this isn't good, this isn't helpful. This isn't making me feel feelings. I guess podcasts aren't for me,” and they sign off forever.
That was my concern. And the fact that at one point, someone who tracks such things took a deep look and they saw that 40% of new podcast episodes that were dropping in a given week were coming from AI sources.
I find that concerning, because I don't think that those are the kind of shows that are going to bring people back into the ecosystem.
Jeanine Wright
Well, I heard a number of different things in there that, you know, essentially, you might define slop as like something that's not useful, or your perception is that it's something that's not useful. I mean, from my perspective right now, the overwhelming majority of the world's information is not available via audio. And I think that's not great.
I think that we should make more of the world's information available via audio. I mean, audio is having this beautiful resurgence where more and more people are wanting to consume content via audio instead of having to, you know, read it on a screen or try to find it in a book, etc..
So making more of the world's information easily available to people via RSS, yeah, I disagree with you that that's a disappointing audio experience. I think we need to continue to bring into podcasting more and more people who want to consume content audio first, and we're not going to do it.
Dusty Weis
I've got to disagree with you there, though, because we already have more information at our fingertips than we've ever had in human history. And yet, study after study shows that people are less informed than they were 20 years ago. They're less fulfilled. They're less connected to humanity than they ever were before.
And I would argue that the solution is not more information that we need right now. I would argue that it's better information. It's insight.
Despite Jeanine's claims that she sees growing positivity toward AI-synthesized media, the numbers don't seem to bear that out. Edison has been the leading pollster doing research around podcasting since before most people knew what a podcast was.
And in their latest report, they found some tolerance for podcasts that use AI tools. 70% approval for using AI to brainstorm topics 63% approval to generate cover art.
But 52% of those surveyed disapprove of using AI to draft scripts.
And a conclusive 75% disapprove of AI podcast hosts.
Despite what they may say in Silicon Valley, people don't like AI slop. And even if that's hard to define, they know it when they see it. So coming up after the break.
Jeanine Wright
All businesses need PR strategies so that they can get attention when they need to make noise, when they need to raise money, when they need to debut publicly.
Dusty Weis
I'm going to press Jeanine on why Silicon Valley tech CEOs say such outlandish things, despite what the vast majority of real people seem to want. That's coming up in a moment here on Lead Balloon.
This is Lead Balloon and I'm Dusty Weis, and we continue now my conversation with Jeanine Wright, the CEO of Inception Point AI.
You mentioned that you've said some things over the past year that were deliberately designed to push the cutting edge, that that's where you like to live.
Jeanine Wright
I don't think I said that, I said I'd like to say bold things.
Dusty Weis
You like to say bold things.
Jeanine Wright
Yeah, I like to say bold things. Yes.
Dusty Weis
You've said a few bold things. And one that sticks out to me was something that you told The Hollywood Reporter that “We believe in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we're the company that's bringing those people to life.” You remember that one?
Jeanine Wright
Yeah.
Dusty Weis
Do you still feel like that? And have you said with the implications of that, like if AIs are people, what that means?
Jeanine Wright
You know, the nuances is that I think that many of the ways that people are going to engage with AI, that people are going to engage with businesses, that people are going to engage with robots, etc., are going to be through a human-like interface, a designed, a synthetic personality. So I continue to believe that to be true.
And we've now seen a number of other major influential voices in this space who are building in the space say something very similar. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg, not a few months ago, said that he believed that more than half of the people on the planet were going to be AI, you know. I'm not pretending that he got that for me. Right.
I think people are coming to this thinking on their own, right, and being able to see the way that people are engaging with AI and are finding it particularly effective and helpful, is through something that feels like a human-like interaction.
And yeah, have we thought about the implications of that? I think about that a lot. I've had conversations with a number of people about that. We have an ethicist that we meet with somewhat regularly where we talk about, you know, some of the obligations in the way that we go about building creators.
Dusty Weis
Yeah. If I own an LLM, is that slavery? Or if I unplug an AI, put it out of commission? Is that murder? Like, these are really uncomfortable questions.
Jeanine Wright
They are very uncomfortable questions. And we've sat with a lot of those questions.
We've even internally worked on AI bill of rights, like what should be the ways that we obligate ourselves to interact with them if we're going to be, you know, values-based builders, and we're going to think about the implications of not just like these characters themselves, but understanding that the people who are engaging with these characters on the other end are real people.
And so what obligations do we have to the audience that is experiencing the content that we're producing through a personality that seems human-like? But we design characters of all different kinds, right? We design characters that are photorealistic, but we also design characters that are more animated, more cartoonish. And perhaps there's different ways that you think about what your obligations are depending on how real it looks.
And we've had lots of conversations about that internally too.
Dusty Weis
Notice how her language shifts in her response to these questions.
I asked her to reaffirm whether she really believes that AIs will make up half the population. In other words, whether they are equivalent to humans.
And instead of asserting that this is indeed a sincerely held belief of hers, she immediately pivots her language to describing the AIs as “personalities,” “characters,” and “human-like.”
She says they have conversations with an ethicist, and discussed an AI bill of rights… but doesn’t elaborate on what they’ve decided.
“We believe AIs are people, except when that means that owning an AI is slavery. But don’t worry, we’ve discussed this internally. We just can’t tell you what was said internally.”
For me, it is indicative of the exact same narratives that lead critics to accuse the tech industry of being manipulative and insincere and opaque in their statements about this emerging technology.
Dusty Weis
One of the criticisms that's often leveled at the AI industry right now is that the executives there say these wild and crazy things to get attention, to drive investments, that maybe Mark Zuckerberg wasn't being entirely sincere when he said that half of the people on the planet will be AI.
Just over the past couple of weeks here, we saw this news story about another developer at one of these AI companies quitting their job because they didn't feel like there were proper guardrails and that humanity was literally at risk.
I'm not personally convinced that this is all not just marketing, but is there anything that you've said over the past year that you didn't feel entirely sincere about? Where you were playing up for the crowd? Or is this just the way that we get business done in the world of Silicon Valley?
Jeanine Wright
There's nothing that I've said that I don't feel like was sincere, or that I feel like I need to go back and correct the record, but you and your audience know… you have been in this space, in this industry for a long time. When you go to speak to the press about what it is that you are doing because you want to get notoriety for your company, because you're kicking off your fundraise, like all of the professional, respectable journalists, you don't get to tell them what to say.
You don't get to read it before they publish it. You don't get to pick what the headline is going to be. Right. So many times, perhaps they write an article that sensationalizes your comments. And sometimes over the last year and a half, I have been surprised by the way that a journalist positioned a piece that we talked about and the extent to which it was prodding the bear.
Dusty Weis
I asked Jeanine about the most widely-cited article on Inception Point AI’s launch, an article she herself posted to LinkedIn a year ago to announce the company’s call for investment. In fact, if you Google Inception Point AI, this Hollywood Reporter headline is still one of the top three results:
“5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan”
In that article, that’s where Jeanine said that thing about half the people on the planet being AI, also an infamous comment about critics being “lazy Luddites.”
So is that Hollywood Reporter poking the bear?
Jeanine Wright
Yeah, I mean, I think the title of The Hollywood Reporter article and emphasizing the volume of the content that we were making at the cost that we were making it at was surprising and was certainly not one of the titles that we had pitched for the piece that they were writing on us. But I do my job and they do their job, and that's part of the freedom of the press and them getting to decide what their audience is and what the world should know about.
And yeah, I would say the timing of it, we were kicking off our fundraising campaign to fund the company, so we were very intentional that we were coming out of stealth, and we leveraged our relationships with the press to get attention, to be able to be a company that was noteworthy enough for us to get meetings and to drive our fundraising campaigns.
So was it a PR strategy? It was a PR strategy being executed the same way that all businesses lead PR strategies so that they can get attention when they need to make noise, when they need to raise money, when they need to debut publicly, when they need to get attention around the new product.
I mean, it was no different than the way that any other business operates, I think.
Dusty Weis
Yeah, it's just you guys did so much work to make such a big splash and put yourself out there and made bold statements, as you said that you like to do. And I guess it was then surprising to me, and I think some other people in the industry, to see you back away a little bit from that business model.
Why make those bold, bold statements about something that ended up not being the main thrust of the company? It seems like just a lot of trouble that you made for yourself.
Jeanine Wright
Hmm.
Dusty Weis
Seems like a lot of headache. Like you're a nice person, Jeanine. I like you, even just sitting here talking about it, I genuinely like you. And you've put yourself in this position to be cast as villain to a whole lot of people in the industry that you worked in.
Jeanine Wright
Can I challenge your thinking on that a little bit?
Dusty Weis
Please.
Jeanine Wright
Yeah. Did I put myself in that position, or is this the narrative that the world wants to tell right now? Because from my perspective, particularly women who are building on the frontier of AI are being vilified.
Because there is a perception that it's okay for men to be, you know, the AI cowboys and to, like, cheat on everything and like, you know, blah, blah, blah, all these things that we're going to push the envelope and the world has much more of a tolerance and an acceptance of men building at the frontier of AI and being hyper disruptors.
Dusty Weis
I would push back on this, but because I think that Mark Zuckerberg and Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have cast themselves as some of the biggest villains in American culture right now, I think they've made themselves lightning rods.
Jeanine Wright
Yeah, I think your language is interesting. Yeah, I think it recognizes only one side of the PR machine. You think people are more likely to get clicks and news stories written if they take a negative slant, or if they take a positive slant? From my perspective, there's very few of us women building on the frontier of AI, and the overwhelming majority of us have been vilified.
And there is this perception that women should care more. Don't you have kids? Don't you care about the environment? Don't you care about the planet? Don't you worry about the values and therefore, you know, like, why would you be building in this space?
And for me, that's exactly why.
You know, after The Hollywood Reporter article came out, I got so many death threats, I had to make a filter for the word “kill.”
And that's one small piece of it. Right? And I don't have the resources of Dario and Sam and Mark to protect my house with 24-hour security and watch my kids as they go to school every day. Right. You have to believe that it's important and that you're doing the right thing and that you're actually going to make a difference.
Dusty Weis
I've been working behind a microphone for 25 years now. Over those 25 years, and especially since I started my own company seven years ago, I have formed a new respect for the people who used to sell air at the radio stations that we worked at, the people who had to take the content that I was creating and turn around and get people to pay for that.
I understand the inherent pride now that comes from being an entrepreneur, from building something. You have built many things, and I admire you for that.
But where you lose me now and where I think that you've lost a lot of people is in your why. And I don't want to have a debate about art versus business because that debate, I think, is frankly played out.
The people who are in it purely for the art, they can be elitist and aloof. But also, people that are in it purely for the business end, they can be cold and they can be crass.
And at the end of the day you don't deserve to get death threats in your email.
But also, the creative process still matters. And what's important to me is that creativity is not producing some thing, I believe that creativity is PRODUCING something.
That the inherent value of creating comes from applying my human experience to sitting and meditating on that, putting my back into a thing, and then using that to help other people evolve their own thinking as well.
Plugging prompts into an LLM feels hollow compared to the creative process that I think so many of us in this industry live our lives by. And so when you say that you're sincere in your belief that you were doing something that matters, I believe you. But also I just I think you're wrong.
Jeanine Wright
Yeah. And that's okay. And maybe you will never be one of the creators who really embraces what I think is these incredibly powerful creative tools. But from my perspective, I'm really enjoying witnessing all of these creators realize the incredible creative potential of partnering with our AI tools and many of the creators that we get to work with now, they love the fact that if they have ten good ideas, they can make ten shows.
Dusty Weis
Oh, you're driving, you're driving right now at the thing that does get me excited about AI, because I am not anti-AI. I am a person who is here for technology that is going to help creative people be more creative. But the operative word in that sentence is creative “people.”
Jeanine Wright
Well, to be clear, half of my team is creative, half of my team is tech. All we do is service creators. And I want to be candid because a lot of people, they don't like the journey, but I never would have been able to be doing the cool stuff that I'm doing today had I not done all of that stuff, had I not made thousands of videos and hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes because I had to figure out and hone my tech stack.
I'm integrated now with close to a thousand models. I had to understand what models are not good at hands and what models are not good at text, and I had to be able to build the infrastructure to orchestrate it so that I can optimize for publishing schedule and quality and cost. And I could not have gotten here without being there. And so people want to be excited about the product that I have today, but be upset about what it took in order for me to get there.
And I understand that. I understand that they didn't like the journey. You know.
Dusty Weis
Jeanine Wright is the CEO of Liquid Studios. Jeanine, thank you for joining us here on Lead Balloon.
Jeanine Wright
Thank you so much for having me. Appreciated the conversation.
Dusty Weis
We’ve got a saying here in the Midwest, where people still care more about people than they do about robots.
“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
At Inception Point AI, they tried to sell a replacement for human creativity that folks didn’t want.
They tried to tell us it wasn’t slop, but it was clearly slop.
And then when nobody bought the slop, they moved away from that initial business model, and their CEO says the ends justify the means.
That publicly devaluing the work of human creators and flooding the ecosystem with noise pollution… worked as a public relations strategy. It got them meetings, it got them investors. And now, to appease those investors, they are rebranding, running away from the business model that caused all the fuss in the first place.
In law schools and in business schools and in PR schools around the world, this is what they tell students that good CEOs and lawyers do. Serve the investors.
And I think that's what we've proved about the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem. It's all backwards. The way technology is developed, the way it is funded, the way it's pitched to us.
I said at the beginning—I don’t think Jeanine Wright is a bad person, she’s just trying to get ahead in a bad system.
In this ecosystem, the value of an executive like Jeanine Wright is not calculated by how hard she works or how good she is to her people, or whether she does good in the world. It's calculated based on the return on investment she delivers to investors. Technology's value is calculated based on whether it makes hype, not on whether it makes a difference.
To take up time and attention, to make money without serving a higher purpose. That is the definition of slop. And it didn't originate with AI.
So Ronald Young Junior, you and I and the creators like us, will still be here telling stories intentionally on the platforms that we feel best serve the audience. And hopefully our audience continues to support us in that work. And it is work. Any final thoughts from you on this, beyond just “Oh my God, I can't wait to see what happens next”?
Ronald Young Jr.
I mean, yes, that and also, I mean I'm going to continue to not Google Inception Point or not look into Liquid Dreams or any of this stuff. And I would like you...
Dusty Weis
“Liquid Dreams” sounds like a personal lubricant.
Ronald Young Jr.
Well, it's actually the name of the O-Town studio album, if I'm not mistaken. O-Town, everyone look that up. You're welcome for that little nostalgic burst I just gave you. But I say that to say, if the only news that I'm getting from Inception Point…
Because after we did that, I'm like, I hope I never hear about these people again. Looks like my dream came true. If this transforms again and the emails that I get from you are only hey, here's another development. That's the only way I want to get this news, to be honest with you, straight from you, Dusty Weis.
Dusty Weis
I'm right there with you, brother. This is good. Ronald Young Jr, award winning podcast host of Weight For It and many other shows, including one that it sounds like he's cooking up right now. Thank you so much for joining us again on Lead Balloon.
Ronald Young Jr.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Dusty Weis
Thank you to Jeremy Morris as well for sharing his insight. And thank you for listening.
Here on Lead Balloon, we share human insights from the world of the human act of communicating. You can tell other humans who might appreciate that about the show to support the work we do. Or you can hire us to tell stories that matter on behalf of your company.
Because Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we help global brands use podcasting to serve their audiences. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, PodcampMedia.com. Music for this episode by Falls and Midnight Daydream, not Liquid Dreams. Production assistance from Matt Covarrubias.
And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.
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