Sydney Radio Station Secretly Used AI-Generated Host For 6 Months Without Disclosure 57
The Sydney-based CADA station secretly used an AI-generated host named "Thy" for its weekday shows over six months without disclosure. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: After initial questioning from Stephanie Coombes in The Carpet newsletter, it was revealed that the station used ElevenLabs -- a generative AI audio platform that transforms text into speech -- to create Thy, whose likeness and voice were cloned from a real employee in the ARN finance team. The Australian Communications and Media Authority said there were currently no specific restrictions on the use of AI in broadcast content, and no obligation to disclose its use.
An ARN spokesperson said the company was exploring how new technology could enhance the listener experience. "We've been trialling AI audio tools on CADA, using the voice of Thy, an ARN team member. This is a space being explored by broadcasters globally, and the trial has offered valuable insights." However, it has also "reinforced the power of real personalities in driving compelling content," the spokesperson added.
The Australian Financial Review reported that Workdays with Thy has been broadcast on CADA since November, and was reported to have reached at least 72,000 people in last month's ratings. Vice president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, Teresa Lim, said CADA's failure to disclose its use of AI reinforces how necessary legislation around AI labelling has become. "AI can be such a powerful and positive tool in broadcasting if there are correct safeguards in place," she said. "Authenticity and truth are so important for broadcast media. The public deserves to know what the source is of what's being broadcast ... We need to have these discussions now before AI becomes so advanced that it's too difficult to regulate."
An ARN spokesperson said the company was exploring how new technology could enhance the listener experience. "We've been trialling AI audio tools on CADA, using the voice of Thy, an ARN team member. This is a space being explored by broadcasters globally, and the trial has offered valuable insights." However, it has also "reinforced the power of real personalities in driving compelling content," the spokesperson added.
The Australian Financial Review reported that Workdays with Thy has been broadcast on CADA since November, and was reported to have reached at least 72,000 people in last month's ratings. Vice president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, Teresa Lim, said CADA's failure to disclose its use of AI reinforces how necessary legislation around AI labelling has become. "AI can be such a powerful and positive tool in broadcasting if there are correct safeguards in place," she said. "Authenticity and truth are so important for broadcast media. The public deserves to know what the source is of what's being broadcast ... We need to have these discussions now before AI becomes so advanced that it's too difficult to regulate."
CADA station (Score:5, Informative)
CADA (call sign: 2ONE), formerly known as The Edge, is a music radio station based in Australia, operated by the ARN Media. It was relaunched as CADA in 2022, and broadcasts Hip Hop and R'n'B. (According to Wikipedia)
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So it is music and someone who is ignored by all listeners occasionally reading the title of an odd song from the "stream"?
Small wonder nobody noticed.
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Indeed. Probably was an improvement. Obviously, the next step is to do that locally and do without the station completely. They probably do not realize that...
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Well, it certainly is a huge "success story" for the "AI".
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So it is music and someone who is ignored by all listeners occasionally reading the title of an odd song from the "stream"?
Small wonder nobody noticed.
It's a hip hop and R&B station, they don't play music either.
It does go to show that the quality of radio show hosts is pretty abysmal if they can be that easily replaced by AI... Then again, I don't think many people actually listen to the radio, it's mostly background noise to prevent people from being alone with their own thoughts.
"enhance experience" (Score:5, Insightful)
"enhance experience" is an executive's way of saying "enshitification"
Re:"enhance experience" (Score:5, Insightful)
We're talking radio hosts. That usually means the only skill they need to have is to keep their lips flapping.
In my estimation, radio hosts are the absolutely dumbest people on earth. Or at least they look like it due to statistics. The more words you produce, the higher the chance that something absolutely asinine tumbles out.
I see no value lost in having AI do this instead. Well, perhaps other than having to find something else for such people to do.
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If they went into politics would that be better or worse?
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If they went into politics would that be better or worse?
Falsehoods, fabrications and fantasies delivered with confidence? It'd be hard to tell the difference.
Re:"enhance experience" (Score:5, Interesting)
And write, apparently. Someone needed to produce the "script" that the AI host used, which may also have had some AI involvement I suppose, but ultimately this seems to be just a glorified text to speech engine trying to cash in on the AI bubble. Or maybe they took it to the next logical step and just feed it a playlist and it generates the necessary "filler" from that and what it can find online from a search of the artist and title, plus some randoms chit chat from a (possibly) curated list of relevant current affairs articles.
Frankly, if people couldn't tell for six months, then whatever they are doing is clearly good enough and the smarter radio DJs are probably already thinking about looking for other work or adding more interactive content like interviews into their shows. Talk Show type presenters probably have a little longer, but it's probably just a matter of time for them too.
Re: "enhance experience" (Score:2)
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Re: "enhance experience" (Score:2)
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My favorite is when they pronounce punctuation from the script (acronyms separated by periods can be great for that), or they make bad attempts at pronouncing things like exponents, etc. I mean, you already know that they are an AI by that point generally, but still it varies between hilarious and annoying. I mean, generally speaking I don't watch videos like that of my own volition, but I certainly get asked by others to watch them insisting that I need to see them and I comply out of politeness. Often wit
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They didn't seek to "cash in on AI bubble" considering that they didn't announce it was AI.
They just replaced the host permanently, saving on money.
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Programmers who design that sort of a thing are paid way more than basic bitch radio hosts. That wouldn't be viable.
What is viable is to have AI do the same thing for far cheaper.
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I'm not sure what the point of this is. Are you perhaps unaware that people who do the playlists for radio are not hosts?
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And write, apparently. Someone needed to produce the "script" that the AI host used, which may also have had some AI involvement I suppose, but ultimately this seems to be just a glorified text to speech engine trying to cash in on the AI bubble. Or maybe they took it to the next logical step and just feed it a playlist and it generates the necessary "filler" from that and what it can find online from a search of the artist and title, plus some randoms chit chat from a (possibly) curated list of relevant current affairs articles.
If all you're doing is announcing songs and putting in some random chit chat then AI is fine for that, and probably a lot cheaper overall. It can automatically tailor feed that goes from a central location to many local stations, and never needs a break.
I had a friend who was a DJ at a local station. His main job was making sure there was no dead air time by queuing up the disk on the turntable so the music started as soon as he hit play as he finished announcing the song; and keeping track of playlists
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I suspect you listen to crap radio stations. The good ones have DJs that definitely add something to the show, be that jokes, games or interesting commentary. For me personally, the ads are the crap bit that detracts from the overall experience (not all our stations have ads, mind you).
However... if you have the budget to mainly play music for the whole show, then there's much less need of a DJ. One radio station near where I grew up had a saturday night show hosted by "Damian Darke", who never spoke - the
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Yep. Same as "Great new design!" or "Now even more xyz!" means worse product and the asshole bean-counters thing they can fix that by making grand claims.
This is a low bar... (Score:2)
There are a lot of radio stations, especially "rock" stations, which can probably work on an iPod Shuffle without anyone noticing. A DJ popping in to announce the call sign, and then throw radio ads can all be automated, and the audience wouldn't really know or care, because other than morning talk show hosts, and -maybe- a show late at night with new content, that can all be a chatbot.
Radio, for the most part, is dead, mainly because the FCC allowed monopolies to sweep in. There may be a few stations wor
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Inserting pre-recorded voice announcer parts into a live automated broadcast to make it seem like it is live is called voice tracking in the industry.
12 years ago at a community station I set-up ZaraRadio Free on a Windows PC running music, promos and callsigns all set to timers to be within the licence requirements running 24/7 as a backup playout system and overnight filler. Nobody could tell the difference between someone being at the station or not.
Why would listeners care? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly. If no one noticed, who cares?
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^^ This post is what the entire discussion should be about.
If AI can adequately replace a human, is there a reason we should object to it? For over 100 years, we have allowed technology to displays humans. Is this time different? If so, why? Is it because it replaces us in ways we morally object to? Is it because we are concerned that there will not be jobs left for humans? Is it economically unsustainable? Or is it just history repeating itself and people are afraid, just like we were during the adv
Was she interactive? (Score:2)
The article does not really say (or I'm missing it), but I can imagine an AI host just spouting random crap between your typical playlist songs or adding minor commentary to news or something (that's what LLMs are for!). But did she answer calls, e.g. random callers just commenting on songs, or competitions "our nth caller gets the prize!"?
Whats the issue (Score:1)
So whats the issue. :)
I want an ai to mix dance tracks and play them
cut down the ad's and the talking
A AI radio DJ (Score:2)
why not! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even if these are niche job skills that only some people possess as long as you have enough history without wide variation, you can hire and train clones to do be uninnovative hacks. They were formulaic already for decades, this simply automates yet another job that lacks diversity; which fits in an age where we only want what is familiar to us. The main task will be sorting people into familiarity groups which is being automated too.
All that is going to be left is innovative and creative work from which
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Why would anyone care? If I like what I am listening to I don't give a shit whether it is human, AI, Robot or a gay fish. If they can effectively replace some of the radio jockey's with AI then great as lets face it they do fuck all anyway and it is not exactly a high skill job.
And radio host is infinitely more "high skill" than disk jockey... I mean how hard is it to press play on someone else's music... at least a radio host might need to talk.
Which is pretty much the last bastion of radio in most countries, definitely in Australia... talkback radio.. However I can see this being replaced by AI relatively shortly as the people who call into talk back radio tend not to be very bright and all the AI needs to do is regurgitate some nonsense about immigrants to keep them angry an [wikipedia.org]
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And radio host is infinitely more "high skill" than disk jockey... I mean how hard is it to press play on someone else's music... at least a radio host might need to talk.
Disk Jockey used to be a reasonably high skill occupation (at least potentially, there certainly were bad ones). Basically they had to combine the roles of a filing clerk and archivist/curator for a music collection with being an audio tech (potentially other tech skills involved with broadcasting as well), scheduling tasks, and they pretty much always had to talk on air because they needed to fill time while operating the equipment. It also helped a lot to be a real music nerd who knew all about the bands
Neat! (Score:2)
Now we just need an AI which can record the broadcasts and chop out the DJ audio part and the ads.
Next: AI-Generated Political Candidates (Score:1)
AI dj (Score:3)
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Yup, by mid-'90s I was fed up with enshitification of US FM stations. Got into CD changers for the car and home, culminating in the Sony DVP-CX850D 200 disk changer I had for many years.
Once the PowerMac G5 came out, finally had a system fast enough to let me rip all my disks to disk.
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America has an 80's station that's DJ'd by Casey Kasem [wikipedia.org].
From beyond the grave. Still better than that Aussie AI.
A robot takes a shift (Score:2)
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They Thy Master is 'in'.
it's as if a million voices cried out in terror- (Score:4, Funny)
All sounding like Wolfman Jack
But probably... (Score:3)
Been there, done that. Probably. (Score:2)
The gym where I work out has Sirius XM as their background music, variously Hits 1 or The Pulse. If you told me it was all pre-recorded loops and/or AI I wouldn't doubt it.
The gym's soundtrack has nevertheless introduced me to some neat new music, duly added to my workout playlist. In that sense it's served its purpose. It's also exposed me to some truly dire excuses for music. People buy this garbage?!
The radio-friendly versions of songs are sometimes inadvertently amusing. "My give a craps are on vaca
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Was the XM radio sound quality in the gym half decent (probably internet-delivered)? XM radio in a vehicle sounds like tinny horrible trash. Makes AM radio sound good. Makes me wonder how XM stays in business.
Audible is trying as well. (Score:2)
I've listened to a couple of the Audible audio books and it's not terrible.
Issues -
no inflection. It's not reading ahead to get the question mark so sentences are flat.
not able to handle some of the strange English pronunciations - example: live (not dead) vs live (like where you reside).
Other than that for a simple audio book it's not that bad.
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Names. Names are great on those. My GF listens to a lot of audio books, many of which are narrated by AI these days. Just yesterday, I was listening it refer to a character named Cassiopeia as Cassio-PEE. Funny the first few times, but maybe just a bit annoying after the first ten or so. That seems to happen a lot, along with the other things you mentioned like not being able to distinguish the pronunciation of heteronyms like lead, bow, excuse, etc. from context or place proper emphasis on words in a sente
Probably would be an improvement at this point. (Score:2)
Where I live, Most of our stations are owned by either IHeartMedia or Cumulus. The "DJ's" are all nationwide cookie cutter Random Factoid Top 40 Celebrity News spewers that are basically placeholders to give them an excuse to tell you what car dealership bought the Studio, News desk, Weather center, Traffic report, ETC's Naming Rights in between more commercials and playing stingers of one of their station "Brands" such as Kiss, Froggy or Real.
At this point an AI DJ would be an improvement. They might actua
The Simpsons did it first (Score:2)
The DJ 3000 [youtube.com]