I agree. I think I listen to podcasts just for a bit of "social noise" when I'm doing something by myself and for occasionally picking up on something new I hadn't heard of before. For pure information content, I think they're actually very poor. It's not unlike listening to an old AM radio talk show. Hosts repeat themselves, engage in banter, and often oversimplify topics for the sake of a narrative.

I also think AI podcasts could become popular one day for people who just want some background noise and bits of trivia every once in a while. I would argue that a lot of YouTube channels I sometimes have in the background just summarize Wikipedia articles and don't have much of a personal touch anyway, so an AI could do the same thing.