A state-funded radio station in Poland called Off Radio Krakow recently attempted a little experiment that quickly blew up in its face. They tried replacing all of their hosts and journalists with AI voices. To twist the knife further, the station then fabricated an interview with a deceased Nobel laureate using AI.
Within days of laying off the entire staff and replacing them with AI voices, over 23,000 people had signed a petition condemning the station’s bizarre and cruel shift to an all-AI staff. One of his on-air personalities, Lukasz Zaleski, found out about the station’s use of AI when, after he was fired, he tuned in to listen to an interview with Wislawa Szymborska, an iconic Polish poet and essayist who won the Nobel for literature in 1996.
The problem is that Szymborska has been dead since 2012, which Zaleski could confirm because he attended her funeral. The Gen Z interviewer was someone he had never heard of either—because they were one of three AI personalities the station conjured out of thin air.
Emelia, 20 years old, Jakub, 22, and Alex, 23, are all AI-generated voices complete with AI-generated headshots and bios on the station’s website. All their pictures have that creepy, uncanny valley airbrushed look that immediately sets off the “kill it, kill it now” receptors in your brain.
Mariusz Marcin Pulit, the station’s editor-in-chief, says he didn’t intend to replace people with machines when he replaced people with machines. He says his only goal was to revive the fledgling radio station to make it appealing to younger listeners because young listeners go bonkers laying off a workforce and replacing it with cheap facsimiles of humanity.
Speaking to the New York Times, the guy also tries to make it seem like he was using the whole thing to make a point about AI’s role in society like he’s some kind of misunderstood artist but he just comes off as full of shit.
The whole experiment lasted only a week before Pulit pulled the plug on the AI hosts after a severe backlash. Looking back on the fiasco, he said “We are pioneers, and the fate of pioneers can be difficult,” to which I respond “Fuck off, idiot.”
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