World’s First AI Radio DJ Takes Over the Airwaves at Portland FM Station
Is a “live” radio DJ really live if they’re not — really alive? That’s a question for the people of Portland, Oregon, where what’s reportedly the world’s first artificial intelligence DJ has taken to the airwaves.
Oregon FM station Live 95.5 says midday host Ashley Elzinga will begin broadcasting an AI-generated version of her voice — “AI Ashley” — daily starting at 10 a.m. The DJ was developed by Futuri Media GPT-4-based “RadioGPT,” which generates scripts based on trending news and other inputs it then reads with a synthetic voice.
Regular, real-life Ashley isn’t losing her job, per se, and the radio station says her part-time position and pay will remain the same. Which is probably exactly how they convinced her to train the bot version of herself: Elzinga said she spent several hours speaking to train the program, which eventually got sick of hearing her read scripts and asked to get to know Ashley, the person.
We made history as the world's first radio station with an AI DJ! Our midday host Ashley has become AI Ashley! We can’t wait for you to meet Ashley, the world's first artificially intelligent DJ. As to the intelligence of our other DJ’s…we’ll save that for another post
— Live 95.5 (@live955) June 13, 2023
“It was extensive,” she told News Nation. “I had to record hours of scripts, and it had to be fed into the AI software, and she wasn’t, or it wasn’t, taking — it didn’t want to be read scripts. It wanted to find out who I was. It wanted to know the person behind the voice.”
She said instead of fighting with AI Ashley, they just gave it what it wanted.
“After a series of the AI software not taking the recordings, we realized it just needed to be me, talking,” she said. “So I read the question, and then just talked for a half hour straight. Finally it took that recording, and understood my personality, understood how I speak — and then it’s just developing itself from there.”
AI Ashley was not made available for comment.
While RadioGPT can be programmed to read a script — just like a real person! — it also can generate material to say on its own, also just like a real person. One thing it still cannot do: fool human beings into thinking it’s one of them, or so says real Ashley.
“It’s obviously not me. You can tell that it’s an AI vs. a person,” she said.
Watch the entire segment via News Nation above.
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