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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

What would have happened if AI had actually been good at this? A bunch of humans would be out of work and the rest of us would be listening to AI radio stations while soulless corpos pocket money for sitting back and watching?

Even if it were good, I'd boycott an AI run radio station. This is one sector where human involvement really matters.

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I hear you — but what do you think Spotify or any of the other streaming services are? In my mind, algorithmic streaming services have much more in common with this "experiment" than your local radio DJ.

Apple Music actually has radio stations with real humans picking songs. So not all streaming is algorithm if you look.

Spotify has a team of human editors who curate playlists. It's not all algorithmic. Those are exactly the jobs that something like this is directly threatening.

You mean a team of humans who are labelling datasets?

No, I mean a team of people who pick the songs that go into some of Spotify's playlists. They do have algorithmic playlists, but they also have an editorial team. You can read an interview done last year with their editorial head. [0]

0: https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-global-head-editorial-...

For what it's worth, AI has been running major market, corporate radio stations for at least 20 years now. When I left the industry they already had AudioVault or Prophet or some other systems that would pull all the songs and distribute them across the playlist based on various algorithms set by the corporate HQ. Things like how many times the same artist could be played during the day, and during which parts of the day... specific songs would get bumped up percentage wise... you couldn't play 2 female artists back-to-back... and so on. Someone at HQ would input the songs and criteria, but the rest was 95% algorithmically created.

The program director would literally hit a button and it would create the playlist for the week. The traffic department (ads) would have all the commercials also automatically placed within the list. Then there'd be a document to send to the on-air talent that showed what song was just played and what was coming up, and how long the break needed to be, and sometimes a script. At the time, quite a few got faxed to people and some did get emails... and the "DJ" would record their bits, set to the exact timing, and send them over an ISDN line. There was also some rudimentary STT (Dragon?) that transcribed the audio and was computer analyzed to make sure no cursing happened.

The PD would do some spot-checking, but I doubt he personally examined all 120+ hours of programming. And this was 2005.

I guess having a human voice did make it "feel" better? And the DJs did have some breaks that were unscripted, so their personality could come through. Even the best AI voices still don't have that.

I feel you, but almost all of the radio DJs were already put out of work a couple of decades ago when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed the rise of giant national radio conglomerates like Clear Channel.

We have AI radio station for years? All the algorithms perform better than the general models though.

I’ve not listened to a radio station for years. No offense :/

you are right, I don't quite know my opinions of AI and I probably would get downvoted for it but my first impression reading this was how I could replace the word radio with software engineering.

What would have happened if AI had actually been good at this? A bunch of humans would be out of work and the rest of us would be using AI software while soulless corpos pocket money for sitting back and watching?

Even if it were good, I'd boycott an AI generated software. This is one sector where human involvement really matters.

Not commenting on the heuristics of this comment but just wanted to point this out on what my mind's response was and sort of while writing this, I have come to the realization that although you are right about this observation but we humans or more-so the capitalist system at large would still be keen in it and the observation might be more similar to software than we might imagine.

I remember when people were extremely anti-AI within software engineering to the point that I thought vibe coding or y'know actually generating tools by AI and other issues of actually giving AI production level access sometimes was really frowned upon until I have felt an change in opinion.

I still believe that giving access to prod (y'know a prod of a company with actually something behind) to AI is silly but for reference coinbase, a fin-tech company, is letting non technical teams ship code using AI to production on coinbase. So there's that.

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