Bill Simmons quietly ended The Ringer’s sponsorship deal with OpenAI’s ChatGPT after listeners pushed back against AI-powered segments that appeared across the Spotify-owned podcast network earlier this year.
The move, first reported by Bloomberg Thursday, underscores the limits of AI companies’ aggressive push into podcast advertising, where paid integrations risk alienating the very audiences they’re intended to reach.
“Last spring, we thought we could integrate AI research for baked-in content segments for a couple of our shows the way some of our competitors were doing (and also leagues like the NFL were doing) — I’m always going to try to be early instead of late on something,” Simmons told Bloomberg. “This time we learned almost immediately that those segments weren’t a fit for us — our audience just didn’t like them.”
The sponsored ChatGPT segments appeared primarily on Simmons’ own “The Bill Simmons Podcast” and “The Ringer Fantasy Football Show,” incorporating AI-generated prompts into discussions.
Simmons separately faced criticism for using ChatGPT to generate hypothetical film reviews in the style of Roger Ebert, the influential critic who died in 2013, on “The Rewatchables.”
The objections extended inside The Ringer. Sean Fennessey, who co-hosts “The Big Picture” and appears on “The Rewatchables,” criticized the Ebert segments during an August appearance on “Talk Easy With Sam Fragoso.”
“I don’t like it. I’ve told Bill I don’t like it,” Fennessey said, explaining that he and fellow Ringer podcaster Chris Ryan had expressed their discomfort with the experiment. Fennessey added that he wouldn’t want AI used to recreate his own opinions after his death.
Despite The Ringer’s retreat, AI companies continue spending heavily on the medium. OpenAI spent an estimated $11.2 million on podcast advertising over the past three months, while its combined spending with rival Anthropic topped $13 million, according to Podscribe data cited by Bloomberg.
