A Polish radio station replaces journalists with "presenters" made with artificial intelligence

(AP) –– A Polish radio station sparked controversy after firing its journalists and relaunching this week with “presenters” generated by artificial intelligence.

Weeks after firing its journalists, OFF Radio Krakow relaunched its radio with what it said was “the first experiment in Poland in which journalists (…) are virtual characters created by AI.”

The station from the southern city of Krakow said its three avatars are designed to reach younger listeners and address cultural, artistic, social issues, and the concerns of LGBTQ+ people.

“Is artificial intelligence more of an opportunity or a threat for the media, radio and journalism? We will look for answers to this question,” the station’s director, Marcin Pulit, wrote in a statement.

The change received national attention after Mateusz Demski, a journalist and film critic who until recently hosted a show on the station, published an open letter on Tuesday protesting “the replacement of employees with artificial intelligence.”

“It is a dangerous precedent that affects us all,” he wrote, arguing that it could pave the way “to a world in which experienced employees associated with the media sector for years and people employed in creative industries will be replaced by machines.” ”.

More than 15,000 people had signed the petition as of Wednesday morning, Demski told The Associated Press. He added that he had also received calls from hundreds of people, many of them young people who do not want to be the subject of such an experiment.

Demski worked at OFF Radio Krakow from February 2022, during which he interviewed Ukrainians fleeing the war, until August, when he was among a dozen journalists who were fired. He said the decision was especially shocking because the station is a taxpayer-funded public station.

Pulit insisted that no journalist was fired because of AI, but because their audience “was close to zero.”

Krzysztof Gawkowski, Minister of Digital Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister, weighed in on Tuesday, saying he had read Demski’s appeal and that legislation is needed to regulate AI.

“Although I am a fan of AI development, I believe that certain boundaries are increasingly being crossed,” he wrote in X. “Wide use of AI should be for people, not against them!”

This Tuesday, the station broadcast an “interview” conducted by an artificial intelligence-generated presenter with a voice pretending to be Wisława Szymborska, a Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature who died in 2012.

The president of the Wisława Szymborska Foundation, which is responsible for the preservation of the poet’s legacy, Michał Rusinek, told the TVN television network that he had agreed to the station using Szymborska’s name in the broadcast. According to Rusinek, the poet had a sense of humor and would have liked it to be used.