The Polish radio station’s venture to replace journalists with AI bots provokes backlash

Three AI-generated avatars began delivering the news on a Polish radio station this week, sparking a backlash from journalists who say they were made redundant to accommodate the move. Photo of Maylin Sojo/Pixabay

Oct. 25 (UPI) — A Polish radio station that replaced its human journalists with a trio of artificial intelligence-generated avatars to compile the news has drawn backlash from reporters and skepticism from the government.

Online station OFF Radio Krakow calls it an “experiment” on “the opportunities and threats posed by the development of artificial intelligence,” on Monday rolled out a new format in which three virtual hosts, created using AI technology, deliver news content prepared by “real journalists who use artificial intelligence tools” to generate the text.

The AI avatars host a two-hour weekday show, according to Marcin Pulit, the station’s editor-in-chief.

“The project is time-limited,” he said. “We assume it will not last longer than 3 months and will be evaluated.”

Despite assurances that the use of AI-generated journalists is only a temporary experiment, alarms were raised across the country.

Mateusz Demski, a former live host at OFF Radio Krakow who insists that real journalists were fired by the station to automate the news, led an effort to alert the public and the government to the incident.

Demski said Thursday that a petition he wrote, addressed to other journalists and Polish government officials demanding an explanation of the move, had been delivered to the culture ministry with 19,000 signatures.

Nowhere in Pulit’s announcement does he mention “that several people had lost their jobs shortly before,” the petition.

A letter with similar demands for information about the AI hosts signed by former journalists at OFF Radio Krakow was sent to Polish Minister of Culture Hanna Wróblewska, Demski said in a Facebook post.

The controversy was also joined by Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski, who serves as the country’s minister for digital affairs. He expressed skepticism about the station’s move in one posts on social media on Wednesday.

“I read Mateusz Demski’s story about replacing journalists with artificial intelligence on OFF Radio Krakow and although I am a fan of AI development, I think that some limits are being crossed more and more,” he wrote, adding, “The widespread use AI must be done for people, not against them!”

Pulit denied that live journalists were fired to make way for the AI bots.

He told the Polish business news site Money.pl that “no OFF Radio Krakow employee was fired” — rather, freelancers who supplied a limited amount of original content to a station that mainly played automated music had contracts that were allowed to expire.

“The listenership of OFF Radio Krakow was close to zero,” Pulit said, adding that its programming overlapped with its parent station, Radio Krakow, and another digital channel.

“This was the basis for the decision to make the change,” he said.