Yesterday, the entire infosphere in Poland was alive with what OFF Radio Kraków did – the station announced that on its air you will be able to listen to programs hosted by… artificial intelligence. So is AI replacing journalists in our country?
OFF Radio Kraków fires people
OFF Radio Kraków announced that you will be able to listen to new hosts on its air. They are: 20-year-old Emilia “Emi” Nowak, 22-year-old Jakub “Kuba” Zieliński and 23-year-old Alex. The problem is that these… don’t exist – they’re just AI avatars. The radio claims that it is just a “research and media experiment, trying to diagnose and answer the question of what effects the development of artificial intelligence may have on culture, media, journalism and society.”
The above sounds reassuring, but Internet users are outraged. And it was thanks to Mateusz Demski, who cooperated with the station and hosted a program there. Now he has announced that “a dozen or so people from the editorial office (we are talking about experienced journalists, artists and creative people) will be replaced by artificial intelligence.” The latter outraged other professional journalists and Internet users (including those who did not know anything about OFF Radio until now). But is it right?
The head of OFF Radio commits suicide
Let me start by saying that the station’s situation has been bad for months. In January, the District Court in Kraków entered the opening of the liquidation of Radio Kraków into the National Court Register. Marcin Pulit, the “liquidator” and probably the main villain in this story, is responsible for the trial. However, I will ask again: is it right?
The station was already in such a bad financial condition that at the end of August it terminated contracts with collaborators who hosted programs on OFF Radio Kraków. However, the main reason was the financial situation, and not the cynical policy of replacing people with AI. The invitation to chatbots to “cooperate” was probably an attempt to catch the wind: maybe people will start listening to us out of curiosity, advertisers’ interest in radio will increase, the originators might have thought. But the market perceived it differently, as we already know.
First of all, communication failed, and the situation was made worse by Pulit, who published a bizarre message yesterday, including the following “flower”:
(….) I inform you that no employee of OFF Radio Kraków was dismissed. Since its broadcast in 2015, OFF Radio Kraków has been mainly an automatically programmed music station, supplemented with a two-hour live band and original music programs. These programs, one per week, were mainly carried out by external collaborators and the cooperation agreements with them were terminated (at the end of August 2024)“.
So the logic is this: we didn’t slow down because we only terminated contracts with external creators. Absurdity, grasping at words and misunderstanding of the problem.
The whole thing was also completed by a conversation with Wisława Szymborska. Yes, with this Nobel Prize winner who has been dead for over a decade! Of course, this is an “interview” generated by AI, which the editorial team openly writes about. But why do something like that if the poet can’t even respond to what the chatbot “put” in her mouth?
Yes, the idea of OFF Radio Kraków is an experiment and a failed one. So far, the originators are showing how not to use the new technology, but even ridicule it. Well, unless this is a hidden goal of the journalistic lobby, which wants to show that without living editors, the media makes no sense…
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