A podcast about the Jeffrey Epstein cases came close to two million downloads within a single month and climbed to first place in the UK charts. No large newsroom or experienced journalist stands behind it, only AI and vibe coding.
121 episodes in six weeks
121 episodes in six weeks. A few years ago that would have sounded unrealistic. Today it is not. The podcast The Epstein Files was not created in a newsroom or a production studio. It was made by Adam Levy, an AI creator who used the Claude Opus 4.5 model from Anthropic, along with vibe coding.
Levy built his own tool called Distill, which collects links from various sources and automatically generates audio summaries from them. The podcast itself works on this principle. Every day it brings new episodes based on current news and published documents.
The numbers speak for themselves
In its first month the podcast notched up almost two million downloads. In six weeks, 121 episodes were produced. Last week the show reached first place in the British podcast charts. It is a result that many established newsrooms would envy.
Levy himself describes the potential of these tools aptly: they are a great opportunity to get better at what you are weak at, while at the same time letting you become ten times better at what you are strong at.
Criticism is not absent either
The success in the charts did not come without reservations, however. Some listeners openly criticise the fact that the podcast is built on generative AI. One comment on Spotify put it this way: it is not fair to claim that traditional journalism cannot handle this story, while referring to it several times in every episode. This is a tension that will only grow stronger as similar projects multiply. Where exactly lies the line between curation and real journalistic work?
What next? A media empire from one computer
Levy has not stopped at The Epstein Files. Riding the wave of success, he launched War Desk, a vibe-coded podcast about the war in Iran, and plans further shows. His ambitions are clear. He wants to build a network of interconnected media outlets and become the founder of the next major media company.
The question remains
Samir Chaudry, co-founder of The Colin and Samir Show, has reflected on what this really means for creators. As a creator, he says, he can feel the difference between when he genuinely has something to say and when he is acting purely strategically. He finds strategic thinking less and less enjoyable, because if an idea does not come from him, someone else or some model will carry it through anyway. That leads him to ask: who am I as a creator, and whom could AI not replace?
It is a question nobody has a clear answer to yet. But The Epstein Files shows that there is less and less time to think about it.
Source: https://news.thepublishpress.com/p/this-1-podcast-is-ai-generated
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