The New York Times has a story today about a tiny radio station in Krakow, Poland. How tiny? Its listenership was "close to zero."
So with literally nothing to lose, the manager of the station decided to convert it into a pure AI production: no human announcers, just AI generated hosts. Among other things, they created a show in which an AI host interviewed an AI reconstructions of famous dead people. The audience grew to 8,000 overnight, but:
Less welcome than the audience surge, however, has been a barrage of abuse directed at the public broadcasting system and accusations that it was sacrificing humans on the altar of technology.
“I have been turned into a job-killing monster who wants to replace real people with avatars,” said Mariusz Marcin Pulit, the editor in chief of Radio Krakow and of niche stations operating under its umbrella, like Off Radio Krakow.
....An online petition drafted by Mr. Zaleski, the terminated culture show host, and Mateusz Demski, a fellow presenter who also lost his job, warned that “the case of Off Radio Krakow is an important reminder for the entire industry” and a “dangerous precedent that hits us all.”
The use of A.I.-generated presenters, the petition warned, “is opening the door to a world in which experienced employees associated for years with the media and people employed in creative industries will be replaced by machines.”
The station was so small it had hardly any hosts to begin with—and they were all part-timers with other day jobs. But public outrage was strong enough that the experiment was quickly ended and the station returned to playing ordinary music written and performed by humans.
Is this a sign of things to come? It's one thing when taxi drivers lose their jobs, but quite another when creative types with big megaphones are the ones whose ox is being gored. This is all going to start playing out sooner than most people think.
Great, anyone can unleash a puppet cult figure to create millions of parasocial relationships to build an army to become rich, famous, and powerful.
How could this go wrong?
I would think that eliminating humans in favor of compliant AI would be a boon to Murdoch and crew.
The target audience might prefer the change, assuming that they noticed it in the first place.
I am concerned about how easy it is to *fake* lots of things using AI, about people getting so so enthusiastic about AI, about many people likely losing their jobs because of AI. I don't claim to have some knowledge that would help me predict the future to any extent. But I think we are going to face serious problems as humanity, as human beings, because of AI.
Orson
The whole thing seems gross. Having AI hosts interview AI versions of dead people? Can't they just create some AI-generated listeners and close the loop?
It already has been. Where have you been during all the questioning about the ethics of AI-generated art?
pffft, William Gibson to the punch almost thirty years ago...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru
I recently used a tool from Google called Notebook LM, which will create an AI generated podcast out of material you upload. I uploaded an energy efficiency brief I had written and the result was impressive - not perfect, but really darn impressive.
I used the podcast script to form the content of a presentation at a conference.
AI could replace workers in jobs with a high tolerance for mediocrity. Factory work, for example, just has to be good enough to pass inspection. Right now, it is miles from replacing jobs that have to be done right. Of course, the decision to replace workers is usually done by people who have no idea of what the work is, so all AI has to be good enough for is to fool them.
Every time Kevin Drum writes an article about computers taking peoples' jobs, you can almost hear him salivate.