What were they thinking?
Host of Problems
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.
Nobel Intentions
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.
“I was very angry that real, deep talks and real interviews with real people were replaced with something totally fake,” Lukasz Zaleski, one of the fired radio station hosts, told the NYT.
The forged personalities created for the AI presenters also became a flashpoint of controversy.
One, named Alex Szulc, was touted as a nonbinary progressive “full of social commitment,” according to the NYT. But references to their gender were scrubbed following backlash from LGBTQ activists; this apparently wasn’t the kind of representation they were hoping for.
Face for Radio
Indeed, it’s impressive how much Radio Krakow has managed to piss almost everybody off, including proponents of the technology.
“Although I am a fan of AI development, I believe that certain boundaries are being crossed more and more,” tweeted Poland’s minister of digitalization Krzysztof Gawkowski. “The widespread use of AI must be done for people, not against them!”
Elsewhere in government, Pulit, the station’s editor, has become the villain of the week for the many right wing members of the National Radio and Television Council, who have accused him of “eliminating the human factor,” per the NYT.
With all the hate bearing down on him, Pulit has since nixed the AI-hosted radio show — but he couldn’t resist framing himself and his pro-AI cohort as martyrs in this debacle.
“We are pioneers, and the fate of pioneers can be difficult,” Pulit said in his announcement to staff about the AI show’s cancellation.
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