A Polish radio station has handed over broadcasts to AI, in a decision its editor-in-chief called an experiment on the impact of AI in society – but which appeared to be aimed at financial savings.
OFF Radio Krakow, the online and DAB+ subsidiary of Radio Krakow station, launched last week with new shows hosted by a trio of Gen Z AI presenters named “Emi”, “Kuba” and “Alex”, each with their own biographies and personalities “created by journalists”. announced that it will focus entirely on artificial intelligence.
The content delivered by these AI servers is “prepared by real journalists who use AI tools for this purpose,” said OFF editor-in-chief Marcin Pulit, and after the text is created, it is verified by the journalists and processed for audio.
One of the first items published on the entirely AI-generated site was an interview between deceased Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska and Emi about this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Unlike previous cases, this use of a famous dead person’s likeness was at least consensual.
But coinciding with this “experiment,” OFF Radio Krakow fired a group of broadcasters, one of the fired broadcasters said in a petition urging the station to stop its AI experiment. According to Mateusz Demski’s petition, more than a dozen people lost their jobs as OFF Radio Krakow transformed into an AI-centric platform.
Demski blamed Pulit for the decision, stating that the situation was an example of how creative industries continue to be threatened by artificial intelligence, similar to the Hollywood strikes. Pulit, on the other hand, said that none of the people who were laid off were fired because of artificial intelligence.
In a report published in the Polish edition of Business Insider, Pulit was quoted as saying, “These were our guest employees who did programs for us once a week. “The contracts ended not because artificial intelligence was introduced, but because this formula did not work,” he was quoted as saying.
Additionally, Pulit stated that this project has a limited duration and, according to current assumptions, it will not take longer than three months and will be evaluated afterwards.
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