Radio station uses AI to interview a ghost of a dead Nobel winner with 3 quirky zoomers, who don't even exist. People seem baffled by it.

What could be more dodgy than a radio station dumping its human hosts and replacing them with three alarmingly photogenic Gen Z AIs? If you answered "having those three Zoomer AIs interview a secondAI imitating a Nobel Prize-winning writer who passed away 12 years ago", then you could have a bright future at Polish station Radio Krakow.

Radio Krakow announced on Monday that it would be overhauling its OFF-station. Since 2015, Radio Krakow has broadcast (all the following quotes are machine translated) "a playlist, original music programmes, and a 2-hour morning programme in which most of the time was devoted cultural and social events taking place in Krakow, with the participation by Krakow artists and people involved in the Krakow clubscene."

It's 2024, and that's apparently not what people listen to anymore. The station announced that listeners would now hear "the AI voices of three hosts - model representatives of Generation Z."

The three students are Emilia Nowa (20), "a journalism student and pop culture expert," who "passionately follows the latest trends in cinema, music, and fashion." Jakub Zielinski (22), who studies Acoustic Engineering at AGH, a Krakow-based university, and Alex (23), a former psychology major who "passionately discusses topics related to [and] queer cultures."

They are all robots.

Listeners' reactions were immediate and bitter. Former fans commented on the Facebook post announcing OFF's new direction. They said things like "I wish that you had the same thing--only AI as listeners" and "It appears that the manager who thought it up is the easiest to replace."

Former OFF radio staffers were also not happy. In a separate post on Facebook (via Notes from Poland), Mateusz Demski, ex-OFF host, slammed Radio Krakow editor Marcin Pulit for not mentioning that "a dozen or more people had lost their job just a few moments earlier" in the AI show's glamorous announce. Demski continues, "This gentleman [Pulit] has the audacity of boasting about his many years' experience in journalism." This man, to me, has nothing to do journalism.

Pulit responded to complaints about job losses by claiming "no employee at Radio Krakow has been fired." OFF hosts' contracts were terminated "not due to AI," but because they were "external colleagues" whose work was terminated. Pulit stated that a large part of the content on OFF radio overlapped with other Radio Krakow programmes, and that OFF Radio Krakow had a listenership that was "close to zero." This was the reason for the decision.

Demski then asked readers to sign his petition, which he set up "a bit in helplessness and a bit in anger," protesting the shift towards AI and the danger it poses to journalism. The petition has attracted 16,000 signatures as of the date of this article.

It gets worse. As I said, Gen-Z AI's gala debut was an interview with Wislawa, a renowned Polish writer and poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature for her ironic poetry that "allows the historical and biological context of fragments of human experience to come to light."

The problem is, of course, that Szymborska died 12 years ago, from lung cancer, in 2012. The AI construct that Emilia Jakub and Alex interviewed was herself. She had opinions on everything, including "Korean Literature and this year's Nobel Prize winner Han Kang." This Instagram post allows you to listen to the interview.

You can read a transcript (again, a machine-translated version) of the chat, in which Szymborska praises Pedro Pascal for endorsing Olga Tokarczuk's work on Instagram a couple of weeks ago.

The reaction was as expected. One Polish listener wrote on Facebook: "After firing employees you could at least maintain a minimum dignity." "We are watching a historical self immolation," wrote a second. "I wish many lost lawsuits and massive financial penalties, as well as a clumsy bankruptcies," said another.

If you didn't know, I share this sentiment. It is not journalism to deploy a gaggle AI simulacra in the hope that they will capture the voice and sentiment of Gen Z. Having them tackle sensitive and fraught topics like, for example, "queer cultures" would be to invite disaster and disrespect the actual humans to whom these topics truly matter. This is not to mention the thoughtless tampering of the memories of the deceased with the AI resurrections of figures such as Szymborska. I was unable to find any answer from the station regarding whether they had obtained the permission of Szymborska’s heirs prior to pulling the stunt.

Will it continue? The executive class is not one to let a labour saving technology slip by, but this response has been disastrous. Radio Krakow's chief editor is of the opinion that "we are testing the capabilities and limitations of this new technology at its current stage of development."