AI, ChatGPT, and the Future of Radio?

It was the first week in January when my wife was called into an emergency department meeting at her college to discuss ChatGPT. At that time, the AI app, which creates killer content based on a couple of suggestions, had only been out a few weeks, but in that time, many of the fall semester final essays had been written by artificial intelligence software, not the students. In that department meeting, I overheard people freaking out, but my wife is as cool as she is beautiful. You see, when each semester starts, my wife has her students hand write an essay in class about who they are. In that exercise, my wife, who has been teaching college level English and composition for over 15 years, is able to determine the students' writing style, level of experience, and pick up on grammatical flourishes; a semi colon; overused; for example.

Fast forward a few months. If you attended NAB, you would know that this technology is creating a lot of buzz, but unlike teachers and college educators, most folks in radio are pretty stoked about the tech. There are some nice things about AI to be sure. You can use ChatGPT to quickly write promos and ad copy. Additionally, some of the byproducts of AI tech have really nice byproducts. For example, there are services that will “listen” to audio, record it, then chop it up for soundbytes. But with that, you now get written transcripts, which can be searched up by terms. Then heck, why not have the tech throw in metadata markers for dynamic insertion.

I’m not sure where you stand on this, but as a faith-based community, we should consider the costs of this technology. I think how my wife learns her students' writing style is important here, because I do not think that AI tech like ChatGPT can truly represent your radio station's “voice,” which at its highest purpose, is His Voice, right? We cannot artificially recreate that voice, not that we would want to.

AI tech is here, and the tech can do some pretty amazing things to make our lives and our jobs easier. The image of a sword keeps coming up for me when I think of it. A sword, when properly wielded, can be a tremendous tool to defend and serve, yet, it can also destroy – the double edge is easy to see with this tech. Like a sharp blade, be careful what you do with it, you do not want to cut yourself with it trying to do something cool.

What do you think about this new technology and how it can affect radio for good or bad?

Matt Kellogg is VP of Sales & Business Development at SoundStack – the audio-as-a-service (AaaS) company for every kind of digital audio business. matt@soundstack.com