Radio Kraków
In Kraków, Poland, there is a left-wing talk radio station that broadcasts to close to zero listeners, but being a taxpayer-funded enterprise, it keeps broadcasting, and Poland’s new left-wing government has given no indication that it intends to pull the plug.
One would think the station manager of a radio station with zero listeners could do whatever he pleased (because, well, who would know?). And in an attempt to get someone, anyone, to tune in, he came up with the idea of having his hosts broadcast interviews with AI versions of famous dead Polish poets. That, and he also replaced all his radio hosts with AI versions of the same. So at that point his was a radio station with no human hosts, no human guests, and no human listeners.
This being public radio, the manager naturally felt obliged to meet DEI quotas and so ordered one of his new non-existent radio personalities to present itself as “a non-binary progressive ‘full of social commitment.’”
And it worked. Almost overnight nearly 8,000 listeners tuned in to hear the AI machine whirl. But that’s when the trouble started. The station had to reprogram the sexual orientation of the LGBT host when real activists protested that they wanted a real lesbian or gay man speaking on their behalf. Then the manager of one late poet’s literary estate, who had previously approved of the scheme, complained that the AI version of the dead poet was “putting words in her mouth.”
Next, a low-level committeeman from Poland’s prior conservative government said that the AI programming was serving “strictly political interests.” Even Poland’s new, left-wing “minister of digitalization” declared that “certain boundaries are being crossed.”
If that weren’t enough, the New York Times story on the affair declared that the AI experiment at Poland’s zero-listener public radio station “has highlighted a grave and immediate danger.”
The Times now reports that, having wearied of the whole ordeal, Radio Kraków’s station manager has decided to hire back the humans and return to its taxpayer-funded, zero-listener format.
J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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