Robots run the show as Swiss radio tests AI voices for a day

GENEVA (AP):

The voices sound like well-known personalities, the music features trendy dance beats and hip-hop syncopations, and the jokes and laughter are contagious. But listeners of an offbeat Swiss public radio station repeatedly got the message on Thursday: Today’s programming is brought to you by artificial intelligence.

Three months in the making, the French-language station Couleur 3 is touting a one-day experiment using cloned voices of five real, human presenters, in what managers claim is a world first, and never-aired-before music composed almost entirely by computers, not people. From 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., the station said, AI-controlled its airwaves. Every 20 minutes, listeners got a reminder.

With an eerie, sci-fi movie-like track whirring in the background, a soothing, raspy female voice said, “AI is taking your favourite radio by storm.”

“For 13 hours, our digital alter egos have taken the reins, broadcasting their voices and their messages across the airwaves, without mercy or respite,” the voice said, at times almost taunting listeners, “The boundaries between human and machine have been blurred, and it’s up to you to unravel what’s real and what’s fake.”

Antoine Multone, the station’s chief, said Couleur 3 could get away with the experiment because it’s already known as “provocative”.

FEARS

While some might fear the project could be a first step toward the obsolescence of people on the air – and firings of personnel too – or could weaken journalism, he defended the project as a lesson on how to live with AI.

Station managers say it took three months to train the AI to understand the needs of the station and adopt its quirky, offbeat vibe. The tracks aired during the day were at least partially composed by AI and some were entirely, “and that’s also a first”, Multone said. AI was behind the voices that sang songs broadcast in the morning, and it played DJ in the afternoon, selecting copyrighted music.

To avoid any possible confusion with today’s real news, the synthetic voices, indistinguishable from a real person’s, served up top-of-the-hour news flashes that were way too futuristic to be believable. The AI had been instructed to come up with news that might be read in the year 2070.

Hundreds of messages poured into the station in the morning shortly after the programming began, Swiss public radio said in a statement.

“Many messages just said: ‘Give us back our humans!’” Multone said, “I think that’s great.”