Radio Station's Attempt to Replace Hosts With AI Ends in Absolute Disaster
What were they thinking?
A state-funded radio show in Poland was struggling to retain listeners. So it undertook a shrewd piece of business: fire all the show's presenters, as The New York Times reports, and replace them with experimental AI hosts.
The station, Off Radio Krakow, made the bold gamble in a bid to appeal to younger listeners with a trio of AI-generated "Gen Z" hosts. It sort of worked, in the short term. The mix of outrage, rubbernecking, and genuine curiosity saw the station's "close to zero" listener count initially jump to 8,000.
But was it worth the ensuing backlash that has turned into a nationwide controversy and launched a broader conversation about widespread job destruction that AI could cause? The station's editor — who's been accused of "sacrificing humans on the altar of technology," as the NYT puts it — sounds ambivalent.
"I have been turned into a job-killing monster who wants to replace real people with avatars," Mariusz Marcin Pulit, the editor-in-chief of Radio Krakow told the NYT. He maintains that it was never his intention to replace human workers with AI — even though that's exactly what he did.
The controversy was catalyzed when Radio Krakow said it would air a "unique interview" with Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, which it initially framed as a real conversation.
Since the venerated poet died in 2012, you might think that having her on the show would be impossible. But no: her appearance was AI-generated — as was the host interviewing her.
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