Radio stations have become early adopters of AI, with almost everyone in the AI session room using AI in their work.
With such an interest in using AI for both music and information content, RadioDays has had various sessions on the new technology.
Two of the best technology suppliers discussed how they are integrating AI into their software and also discussed where the balance should be between AI and human intelligence.
Philippe Generali from RCS explained that RCS has been able to do music scheduling for a long time, so what AI brings in this area is not new to the company, so for the next step, RCS is adding AI and ChatGPT to bring the next stage of evolution.
“Today radio has fewer radio Program and Music Directors controlling more channels. How do you handle the playlist for maybe 100 stations, you can’t possibly be looking at all the activities of every station’s schedule,” said Generali.
“At RCS we are introducing the music scheduling in the cloud that will handle all the data points that you have access to as a Content Director. It will go to the next step for you. The AI might say to you, that song seems to be getting lots of play in the outside world, it will show you the trends, it will analyse the fan base of the artist and the song.
“It can link all those data points and suggest to you which songs may have the chance of becoming a number one hit, then help you to program them into the appropriate schedules.”
Hindenberg’s Nick Dunkerley looked at how AI can help journalists. It can aid them with research and give them some new ideas about the topic you will be talking about. But Dunkerley advised serious journalists not to hand over responsibility to AI. As an example he played a realistic sounding radio chat about the history of music between two presenters. It still sounded plausible and had some information in it, but it was ‘crap,’ it was audio filler, according to Dunkerley. It did not really connect with the audience and the presenters did not really connect with each other or the material that they were discussing.
“AI is good at background research, audio cleanup tools, faster more productive workflow, but we should always be thinking about the quality of the output,” said Dunkerley
AI can make it easier and faster for journalists to enhance the audio quality of our output.
“We are using it to remove many obstacles for journalists to be able to focus on quality reporting, but they should use the extra time they gain from these tools to dop better research. If there was ever a time when we need journalists to dig deeper into what is happening, it is now!” he said.
“AI can throw out hours and hours of content but is that what we should be using AI for? We have to make ourselves better, we need to be directing the path of our stories, not having AI be the tail that is wagging the dog. If we don’t better ourselves, we will be irrelevant.”
He advocates safe and smart adoption of AI in radio.
“At Hindenberg we make sure we have the option for an offline system. The problem with having critical sensitive information in the sky, such as confidential sources, is that you don’t know who can access it.”
He quoted an example of a journalist he knows who did an interview with an anonymous source. Soon after he uploaded the interview to the cloud for transcription, an agent from that country’s security services was knocking at his door asking him questions.
“You have to think someone might be listening or accessing data about your sources if you are working online. Be careful of your information and sources if you are doing sensitive work,” he advised.
On synthetic voices, Philippe Generali said RCS clients are asking about synthetic voices, but they are not planning to replacing the DJ, it is about using a synthetic voice to say the station name and weather to make it sound local when the program is heard on many stations. The program is still live, but the listeners to each station will hear the presenters voice giving them the local callsign, local weather and other program elements that need to be localised. “I don’t think synthetic voices are ready yet to replace human beings,” he said.
All this comes down to our choices, according to Dunkerley.
“Do we want to hire a human being, radio is about the human connection. We will need to decide. This is a discussion about humanity and we as journalists and producers will need to make informed decisions about how we use AI… Let’s put effort into the quality of our work so that people will know this was made by a human being.”