AI Replaced All the Staff at a Radio Station in Poland

Fears that artificial intelligence will replace creatives came to pass in Poland recently after an entire radio station was replaced by bots.

State-funded Off Radio Krakow sacked all of its presenters, replacing them with computer-generated versions of Generation Z in a bid to win over new listeners.

The relaunched radio station even landed a major interview with Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish cultural icon. But there’s just one problem: Szymborska died in 2012.

“It was very, very good,” Lucasz Zaleski, one of the sacked radio hosts, says of the AI-generated interview which was initially announced as if it was real. “But I went to her funeral, so I know for sure that she is dead.”

The local radio station had virtually no listeners but that changed when Off Radio Krakow announced its three AI-generated Gen Z presenters — Emilia, 20, Jakub, 22, and Alex, 23. Each of these characters were accompanied by an AI picture on the station’s website.

The gambit paid off and suddenly Off Radio Krakow gained thousands of listeners but most were tuning in because they had been angered by the news. The New York Times describes it as a “barrage of abuse directed at the public broadcasting system and accusations that it was sacrificing humans on the altar of technology.”

The editor-in-chief of Radio Krakow defends the controversial move and tells The Times he was only trying to revive the ailing station and make it more appealing to younger listeners.

To bring the content to life without humans, they used OpenAI’s ChatGPT, ElevenLabs, and Leonardo.Ai. The latter was used to create the AI headshots.

The episode has provoked debate in Poland around the ethics of AI with one parliamentarian writing on the social media platform X that “although I am a fan of AI development, I believe that certain boundaries are being crossed more and more. The widespread use of AI must be done for people, not against them!”

The severity of the backlash has prompted the station to pull its AI experiment but not before the editor-in-chief Mariusz Marcin Pulit described him and his team as “pioneers”.

As for Zaleski, the radio host who lost his job to a bot, he says that while the show was never his main source of income he is “very angry that real, deep talks and real interviews with real people were replaced with something totally fake.”