Polish Radio Station's AI Gambit Doesn't Go Well

Earlier this fall, a Polish radio station laid off its journalists—but while that was distressing enough to the journalists involved, a more recent development is even more so. Off Radio Krakow, part of Poland's public broadcasting system, relaunched in late October, including with what it announced was "the first experiment in Poland in which journalists ... are virtual characters created by AI," per Euronews. "Is artificial intelligence more of an opportunity or a threat to media, radio, and journalism?" station chief Marcin Pulit said in a statement. "We will seek answers to this question."

• The bots: The New York Times introduces the three Gen Z avatars: Emilia, Jakub, and Alex, all said to be in their early 20s (check out their profile photos here) and meant to reach a younger audience. They were part of an experiment that station execs hoped would bump up the number of listeners from the previous "close to zero" stat, according to the head of Poland's public radio.

• Controversy: One "unique" on-air interview right out of the gate especially raised eyebrows: a chat with the late Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Szymborska died in 2012—her voice was used here with permission from her estate, along with ChatGPT, speech synthesis software, and an image generator to create a fake Szymborska for the interview.
• Pushback: The backlash came quickly. "If that is not a breach of journalistic ethics, I don't know what is," Jaroslaw Juszkiewicz, a radio journalist whose voice has been used in the Polish version of Google Maps, said in a Facebook post. Krzysztof Gawkowski, Poland's minister of digitization, wrote on X, "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!"
• End of an experiment: In an Oct. 28 statement, Pulit announced that although the AI project had been meant to last three months, he was pulling the plug, per the AP. "After a week, we had collected so many observations, opinions, and conclusions that we decided that its continuation was pointless," he wrote. He added that he was "surprised by the level of emotion" that emerged after the avatars debuted, "attributing to us nonexistent intentions and actions, harsh judgments formulated on the basis of false reports." He lamented, per the Times: "I have been turned into a job-killing monster."

(More artificial intelligence stories.)