Just recently Drew Carey, host of The Price is Right in the US, used an artificially generated version of his voice for his SiriusXM radio show, “Friday Night Freakout.

The script for the show was generated using ChatGPT, and as one observer put it, “If you were driving down the highway late at night, and you just wanted a bit of company alongside some classic rock, it’s possible you wouldn’t notice the DJ wasn’t human.”

Carey’s Twitter fans said the voice sounded soulless and that they missed the “real Drew”, and he said afterwards that AI could possibly be used in the future for the grunt work of radio and other production.

radioinfo’s Wayne Stamm talked to Mike Hulvey, the President and CEO of Neuhoff Communications, owner and operator of 20 radio stations in Illinois and Indiana about AI and the implications for regional broadcasters.

radioinfo: So the thing I wanted to talk to you about is ChatGPT and Radio GPT, which we’re starting to see a lot more radio stations now use.

ChatGPT is one of those great tools if you’re thinking about writing copy for example and there are some people that are dabbling in it, and then Radio GPT, of course, launched in the last couple of weeks.

It is interesting, and it’s means that there’s a possibility that AI could be on to our radio stations maybe a little quicker than we think.

What’s your thought on it? And the reason I asked this is because you’ve got a group of regional broadcasters where being live and local is really super important.

Mike: Yes. So we are cautiously exploring what the possibilities are for application of this technology, and you have to keep in mind how new that technology is.

You know, it’s interesting, here sits my iPhone and what, this is ten years old. So next to my desk, I don’t think I did this last year when you and I spoke, here’s an iPhone four, and here is my beloved BlackBerry.

So I keep these as props about how quickly technology changes.

But let’s look at this, RadioGPT and ChatGPT and the applications for our industry.

First of all, how old how old is it? Well, 4 or 5 months, you know, and every day you read about another application or someone’s coming to market with something different.

So it is so new.

What excites us about it is not eliminating a workforce.

I will share a conversation I had with one of our operations managers just last Tuesday on this particular subject.

What excites us about it is this it is it is a tool for us to use to leverage for engagement. From a, you know, a practical application of spec commercials and maybe being able to create some spec campaigns to get some ideas to the advertisers very quickly and not have to wait, you know, for a certain production that doesn’t replace anyone.

It makes the workflow move faster and seamlessly and we can be quicker and more nimble in terms of answering to the market.

But back to my conversation with one of our employees. We were discussing it and he was saying, “Well, you know, you can eliminate all of the announcers.”

And I said, well, here’s the thing, does the local advertiser want the computer to endorse their product having never actually used their product?

Does the community want to have you sit in front of them at events and engage with them on specific things? And as we raise money for food insecurity or senior citizens or whatever that may be.

AI can’t do that. The human being can do that.

The human being has that connection. The human being has that ability to change communities and engage and connect. Technology doesn’t.

We can use technology as a tool, but it doesn’t replace that part. And my challenge back to our employee was, you know, the challenge for all of us is let’s find ways that we can use the technology to better what we do in pursuit of our ultimate objectives, but it doesn’t replace that.

Some of the applications that we’re aware of, such as you can, you know, replicate in your own announcer’s voices where you can voice track shows when they’re going to be on vacation. The audience doesn’t know that Wayne is not there this particular week because you’re on holiday with your family.

Um, that’s kind of a novel and unique instead of maybe the way that it’s been done in the past.

But back to the point of my little show and tell. It’s so new we can have this conversation in a month, Wayne,  and there may be some completely new tactical ways to use the technology.

So it’s very new. We’re not afraid of it. And we don’t look at it like, oh, my gosh, it’s going to replace all of these other things. It’s like, how can it help us do our work better? And it’s happening so fast.

The the definition of radio continues to evolve, which is terrific, because if it didn’t, we would be out of business.

To me, radio is about connecting with local audiences. It’s driving local business, it’s improving local communities and our platforms continue to expand. If you assume that your platform agnostic and you’re doing the good work that is done by local radio stations as local broadcasters.

Then we have a bright future ahead of us.

I’ll use an anecdotal piece and that is I have an eight year old granddaughter, her name is Nora. And for the last five years, Nora has voiced a specific audio project for me and she is so excited to be on the radio and she doesn’t even live in our market. She lives in an adjacent market, but she loves being in the car, hearing her voice on the radio.

It’s a big deal. She tells her friends she’s on the radio and they get excited for her. Now if radio had no future because we have generations of the young people that don’t care about radio, why is my eight year old granddaughter excited about hearing her voice on a commercial on the radio.

radioinfo: Part of being live and local, is that you get out into the communities and communities like to see the person who is onair.

My only concern would be that if we start to move in that direction of AI onair, and I think that’s probably going to happen in mid-dawn first and maybe some night or day shifts, is that we’d lose connection with our listeners and we are going to lose the training ground that we’ve got for up-and-coming announcers, and I don’t know how we’re going to replace that.

Mike: Yeah, that’s a very good point. You know, when I was a young lad, I first walked into a radio station at age 14, and I was willing and still am to do anything that, you know, was needed. My attitude hasn’t changed in all these years.

Where is the next generation coming into the business?

Are those personalities creating social content now, in our markets? Are those individuals doing podcasts in local markets?

And as a broadcaster, we have to go into the market and try to find in curate some of those individuals that are living in our community. Again, this is I’m speaking from a, and I like the term local market as opposed to small market.

Where is the farm system, to use a baseball term?

radioinfo: You run summer school for radio that so far has had over 400 students go through. How long has that been going for, Mike?

Mike: This will be our 26th summer which is amazing. And we have so many success stories.

You know, they may not be in radio, but they are in media or they are using some of the skills we teach, and we teach everything from public speaking to interviewing and how to ask a question.

We spend a specific period of class period on how to ask a question. And it’s funny because the kids will say, I can turn this around on my parents as opposed to, you know, thinking about how I’m going to interview a member of the community or a coach or something like that.

We work on open ended questions and things of that nature.  We work on video and play by play and public address and all the different aspects, writing social media, it’s very cool.

So we look at some of our students that we’ve trained over the years and I have three examples that I’m so proud of. All three of these young people started with us when they were in middle school, so they were in sixth grade or seventh grade and they started coming to our summer program.

One individual is now a social media manager for the National Football League, and he has worked the last two Super Bowls. His office is at Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles. He started again as a seventh grader coming to our summer program. And I’m so proud of him. And he he helps anytime I need something for one of our students. He is Johnny on the spot.

The second individual is a young man who has finished a second master’s in communications. He works full time at Ohio University and he is doing social media and media and technology. And his ceiling is so high.

And then our third individual again, started with us in middle school. Does radio or did radio all through high school and college. Got into writing, now works for CBS’s 24 seven sports.

And he does radio and he and he writes and he’s 25 years old and he has a national job.

And there’s all sorts of other kids that have taken the training and they’re applying it. We have a student athlete at the University of Illinois who is a senior. He’s on the football team. And it’s fun to watch him because he is one of the favorite interviews of area media as the student athlete. Well, he was in our summer program when he started in middle school.

And it’s fun to see some of our students who have gone through our program who now interview him and they talk about their time in our summer program.

So that’s just a few examples of how it’s paying dividends and why we keep doing it 26 years later.

radioinfo: And it’s not just being on air. The summer school gives them an opportunity to take a look at all the other parts of the industry that they can become involved in.

Mike: Oh, there’s so many things. And one of our young men that started in our summer program when he was ten years old, when he grew up, he went to business school, came back, started selling in one of our one of our markets in Springfield, Illinois, rose to the position of general sales manager and was doing a great job and then decided to open up his own business.

And so now he has his own insurance agency and he went from being a wonderful employee who started with us when he was ten to now being a client.

And we think that’s a level of success, too.