One of the stations of Radio Krakow (a local studio of the Polish state radio) has gone in a very incomprehensible direction with technology…
Imagine that instead of human presenters, there are three highly photogenic AI presenters interviewing another AI that imitates a Nobel Prize winner who died 12 years ago. That’s what Radió Kraków has come up with. On Monday, the station announced that it was reorganizing its OFF station, despite the fact that it has been covering Kraków’s club scene since 2015. But now we are listening to the AI-generated voices of three characters representing Generation Z.
They have even been given complete personalities and names (20-year-old Emilia Nowa is studying journalism and pop culture, 22-year-old Jakub Zieliński is studying sound engineering at AGH University in Krakow, and the third character is a 23-year-old Alex, formerly a psychology student who is well-versed in identity and queer culture). On Facebook, for example, this is one reaction from the audience: “I wish you exactly the same-exclusively AI as listeners!” Another reaction is: “It seems like the easiest person to replace is the manager who came up with it.”
Mateusz Desmki, an ex-anchor of OFF, accused Marcin Pulit, the editor-in-chief of Radio Kraków, of not informing anyone and causing about a dozen people to lose their jobs, and then said that Pulit had the audacity to praise his many years of experience as a journalist. Demski says Pulit has nothing to do with journalism. Pulit defended himself by saying that no one had been fired from the radio. This is, of course, not true: the people fired were outside contributors, not suspended because of AI. According to the editor-in-chief, OFF’s content was often the same as that of other public radio stations in Krakow, and therefore had a near-zero audience, which was the reason for the decision to change… Demski has therefore started a petition to protest against the change to AI, which he sees as a threat to journalism. Tens of thousands have already signed the petition.
But how does the late Nobel laureate fit in with the Gen-Z trio? Well, Wisława Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 for her poetry, which with ironic precision makes historical and biological connections emerge in fragments of human reality. But she was also made into an AI, and the “interview” with her launched the new OFF direction… The problem is that Szymborska died of lung cancer in 2012. The subject interviewed by Emilia, Jakub and Alex is himself, and in an AI construct he gives his opinion on all sorts of things, including “Korean literature and this year’s Nobel Prize winner Han Kang”.
And you can’t really argue with that. It is distasteful.
Source: PCGamer, Notes From Poland
