Station claims it's visionary, ex-employees claim it's cynical; reality appears way more fiscal
A Polish radio station has ditched its on-air talent for AI in what its editor-in-chief calls an experiment on the effect of AI in society, though it looks like a bid to save cash.
OFF Radio Krakow, an online and DAB+ subsidiary of the larger Radio Krakow station, announced this week that it was going all-in on AI, with new shows hosted by a trio of Gen Z AI talking heads, "Emi," "Kuba," and "Alex," all with their own biographies and personalities "created by journalists," according to the station.
Stop us if this sounds familiar: "The content they [the AI hosts] deliver is prepared by real journalists who use artificial intelligence tools for this purpose," OFF editor-in-chief Marcin Pulit wrote in the announcement. "After the text is generated, it is checked and verified by journalists and then processed into sound."
The same goes for written stories on the site, Pulit said, and even musical selections the AI hosts will play during their once-a-week "authorial" music broadcast.
[Source]: The Register
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fliptop on Sunday October 27, @11:55PM
I guess the station in question plays music. I worked in talk radio for a hot minute and what a lot of people don't know is it takes about 8 hours of show prep to do a 3 hour talk show. In the event you've prepared a show for the following day and there's breaking news, you need the ability to quickly prepare a new show, depending on your time slot of course. If there's journalists and AI doing all the show prep, and then getting it checked and verified, it sounds like pivoting to breaking news would be next to impossible.
A lot of stations that play music and have local hosts are usually prerecorded. The host goes to the studio and in about 15 minutes can put in all the filler between songs, live reads and announcements for a whole show. You can tell these kind of stations b/c they don't have callers.
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