OFF Radio Kraków withdraws its idea of using AI in the operation of the station. For what reason?
Radio Kraków OFF scandal
It all started a few days ago, when OFF Radio Kraków announced that its programs would be hosted by AI bots. Earlier, in August, human journalists were thanked for their cooperation. One of the latter publicized the matter: the message was that public radio was replacing humans with AI bots.
The station’s listenership was low, the programs “didn’t sell” and the radio station was unprofitable. Because of the latter, the use of AI made sense, or more precisely: it was a last resort.
However, the management of OFF Radio Kraków went a step too far: they published an “interview” with Wisława Szymborska. Yes, it’s about a Nobel laureate who has been dead for years. Her voice was “faked” by artificial intelligence, as was the content of her statement. This, together with the earlier dismissal of journalists, had a striking effect: the station was almost universally criticized, but its audience numbers also skyrocketed: from several dozen to 14,000. people per day! If it was all just business cynicism, it worked.
OFF Radio Kraków no longer wants AI
Under such circumstances, radio is now… withdrawing from its AI experiment! What’s more, Marcin Pulit, Editor-in-Chief of the station, emphasizes that “from the beginning, this project was intended as a voice in the debate on the opportunities and threats posed by the development of artificial intelligence.
We assumed that this project would last a maximum of three months. However, after only a week we had collected so many observations, opinions and conclusions that we decided that its continuation was pointless. At OFF Radio Kraków, we are ending programs created by journalists with the use of artificial intelligence (…)
– we read in the message he published.
Suddenly we learn that the point was only to show “how many areas are unregulated – image protection, identification of content created with the support of AI, copyright.”
From the beginning, we cared about transparency and clear marking of content generated using artificial intelligence tools and clearly communicated that we do not intend to replace people with machinesand yet we experienced how the mechanisms of post-truth work, how facts lose their importance when compared to a story that appeals to the recipients’ emotions and their personal beliefs. This should be an important lesson for us, radio people, and the entire journalistic community in Poland
– added the editor-in-chief.
How to evaluate this statement? This is probably an attempt to whiten his image. Of course, the station had the right not to extend the journalists’ cooperation contracts, and it could also replace them with AI. However, writing now that the radio “did not intend to replace people with machines” is already a very risky mental construction. This is exactly what happened: first, journalists were thanked for their cooperation, and then, two months later, they tried to replace them with bots!
I would like to emphasize one thing: I am not saying that trying to replace journalists with AI is a bad thing. Since the station was unprofitable and supported by taxes, it might not have been a bad idea. This may be the future of this profession: less profitable radio stations will be operated by bots, and the better ones will offer programs with a live host. It is possible that products created by people – articles, books, films, songs – will be something exclusive in a decade.
OFF Radio Kraków’s problem was and still is communication, as can be seen from the fragments of the editor-in-chief’s statement quoted above. I have the impression that this made the whole experiment a failure and will now discourage other editorial offices from working on the use of AI.
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