Is your radio human or AI?

The voices sound like well-known personalities, the music features trendy dance beats and hip-hop syncopations, and the jokes and laughter are contagious. But listeners of an offbeat Swiss public radio station repeatedly got the message on Thursday: Today’s programming is brought to you by Artificial Intelligence. Three months in the making, the French-language station Couleur 3 (Color 3)  used cloned voices of five real, human presenters and never-aired-before music composed almost entirely by computers, not people. From 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., the station said, AI controlled its airwaves. Every 20 minutes, listeners got a reminder.

The explosive emergence of ChatGPT last autumn and other “Generative AI” tools have caused a stir and often fear, about the long-term economic, cultural, social and even political consequences. Some musicians have complained that AI has ripped off their styles. In the face of such recalcitrance, the Swiss station, and embraces and seeks to de-mystify AI. Antoine Multone, the station’s chief, said Couleur 3 could get away with the experiment because it’s already known as “provocative.” The Public Radio managers say it took three months to train the AI to understand the needs of the station and adopt its quirky, offbeat vibe. The tracks aired during the day were at least partially composed by AI and some were entirely, “and that’s also a first,” Multone said. AI was behind the voices that sang songs broadcast in the morning, and it played DJ in the afternoon selecting copyrighted music.

But wait, there is more!

Andrew Gray, an aspiring British politician, crowdsourced his platform and used artificial intelligence (AI) to build his manifesto, a “brave new” measure despite its seeming failure, according to one expert. “It’s clear that AI is going to have an impact on how political parties in the U.K. source and target data going forwards, as well as focus their campaigns,” he argued. “We may not have to wait that long for the first AI-inspired victorious candidate, but they will undoubtedly emerge from one of the major parties, with all the electoral advantages they already possess.” 

Andrew first asked constituents to voice their concerns regarding local issues on his website using a program called Pol.is, developed by a Seattle group a decade ago and most notably used in Taiwan to resolve deadlocked issues. In an interview with the Associated Press Gray argued that Pol.is is not the same as ChatGPT and other generative AI models but a “slightly more sophisticated polling than what is already happening. The AI isn’t so clever that it can spit out exactly what the policies are,” Gray said, stressing the process still needs “human moderation and … analysis of what would be a sensible policy position.” But as the program polls the users on a topic, it uses machine learning in real time to group the statements and map them out to identify gaps between viewpoints as well as points of agreement. Gray said he would use the technology weekly to get a sense of constituency concerns. The attraction of this kind of approach to platform building would prove “extremely attractive.”

Intelligent conflicts

Contrary to belief, Wikipedia actually has less factual errors than traditional printed encyclopedias:   Source: Wikipedia

Autocorrect can go straight to he’ll. 

Isn’t it kind of patronizing, that a computer asks you to prove you’re not a robot?

Moses had the first tablet that could connect to the cloud.

Failure is not an option—it comes bundled with the software.

August 2nd Birthdays

1980 – Nadia Bjorlin, 1993 – Cassidy Gifford, 1964 – Mary Louise Parker

1978 – Edward Furlong, 1948 – Dennis Prager, 1933 – Peter O’Toole, 1981 – Sam Worthington

Morning Motivator:

  “Success is failure turned inside out.”

“Sorry Dave…” HAL