Almost You

The radio industry puts a lot of stock into the value of personality, a fact of which I was reminded the other day as we drove around town with a music station on the radio and heard a jock, obviously voice-tracked, use every single break to read something straight out of a show prep service. I mean, it was painfully obvious. No effort, nothing that approached unique, just reading a "did you know?" blurb -- not even all that interesting -- and that's it.

I hear a lot of that on the radio, and in podcasts, too. Hosts just mail it in, especially when voice-tracking but also hosting podcasts with nothing original to say, or talk shows repeating whatever party talking points are making the social media rounds. It's lazy and it's not entertaining, and it's all over the dial. It's almost like it's been generated by some bot, some form of....

Did you say artificial intelligence? Yeah, that. That's what it sounds like. And if your show or station is doing that kind of plug-and-play content, meet ChatGPT.

You may have already tried ChatGPT, the AI platform that writes essays and articles from whatever query you submit. It is, to put it politely, not a finished product. At present, it will give you either a bland article that's grammatically correct but filled with straight-outta-Wikipedia information, or a bland article that's grammatically correct but filled with absolutely incorrect information. I asked it to write an essay about me, and it wrote a glowing biography that was wonderful except for the parts in which it got my birth year, birthplace, college, degree, and all details about my career wrong. I did not go to Brandeis, did not work for the AP, did not work at NPR, and did not win a Murrow Award, nor was I named the Public Radio News Directors incorporated's News Executive of the Year. (For the record, I have won exactly zero awards in my career.) It said that I'm a "respected voice in the world of journalism and a leader in the field of news and information," which is obviously wrong as well. I don't know whose biography the bot used for mine, but whoever it is sounds like a great person. It just isn't me.

The accuracy of the product is beside the point, however. The point is that those things can be fixed, and once an AI writing platform is perfected, it can and will be used to take the place of actual writers. Some news organizations have tried this out with things like local sports coverage; it's not very good yet, but it's only a matter of time before these things reach the bare minimum of "adequate" writing standards, and some writers are going to find themselves out of work.

You're not a writer, though. You're a radio host, or you do a podcast. AI can probably generate voice tracks right now, and there are vendors offering services where AI voices can read whatever copy you feed them and regurgitate reasonable facsimiles of jock patter. Ultimately, you can expect AI bots to be able to generate entire shows and podcasts from wire copy and internet searches. It may not happen any time soon, but it's a reasonable prediction that it will happen at some point if there's money to be made, or saved, with it.

Could a bot replicate what you do as a host? Is what you say when the mic is on anything that AI couldn't create from a show prep sheet or a brush through social media posts? Are you doing canned bits and offering kicker stories or parroting political talking points while showing nothing of yourself to your audience? Could a computer with a human voice do what you do?

Maybe we'll find out soon enough. In the meantime, it might be time for you to put more of what makes you human into your show or podcast. You're not a machine, but you have to let your listeners know that.

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A caveat about using All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page: The idea isn't to just read the topics there, it's to check them out and then put your own spin on things. They're conversation starters, but it's up to you to start the conversation in your own way. But there's plenty of material to help you get there, so click here for that, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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And that's all for 2022. I'll be back with more of this stuff in January. In the meantime, enjoy the holidays and Go Birds.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter (for now, at least) @pmsimon
Mastadon (for some reason I haven't yet determined) @pmsimon@c.im