Remember, in April 2023, Couleur 3 had imagined a special day during which all of its content (voices, texts and music) would be produced by artificial intelligence (AI). Only news bulletins being concocted by humans.
From 6 a.m. until 7 p.m., Couleur 3’s usual voices had been cloned and were present on the air synthetically.
Verdict of the anchor, Antoire Multone, “The result is stunning. Even though we know that they are robots, we sometimes get fooled. The tracks are blurred.”
The experience remained as such and never again did public service radio replace its presenters with avatars. Testing does not necessarily mean adopting.
In Poland, everything went wrong
Off Radio Krakow, a small public service radio station, also adopted AI, but not to experiment with this tool but to find a solution to its financial problems. It was to compensate for layoffs that virtual hosts – Alex, Emilia and Jakub – were created last October.
These avatars not only wrote articles, they also conducted virtual interviews. Thus, Emilia spoke with the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who died in 2012 and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, gave her opinion on the subject of the South Korean Han Kang, Nobel Prize for Literature 2024. Yes, you are right read: the dates are exact and this imaginary interview is totally impossible.
The reactions were not long in coming: “We had planned for this project to last three months, but after a week, we received so many messages that we learned our lessons and concluded that continuing it would be nonsense,” said its administrator, Marcin Pulit, in a press release. “We were surprised by the level of emotion it generated, because it was an experience to learn how to understand AI. »
Truth in Switzerland and lies in Poland?
No, but what made all the difference was communication. In Switzerland, the operation was announced in advance, while in Poland it was the listeners who protested in the face of so many computer hallucinations.
Polish politicians have not hesitated to wade into the controversy. Like Krzysztof Gawkowski, the Minister of Digitization, who launched, on the social network crossed. (…) Widespread use of AI must be for people, not against them. »
QED!
