The French-speaking Swiss public radio station Couleur 3, one of the radio channels of Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS), broadcast a program generated by various AI applications for most of Thursday. The experiment lasted from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The only thing on this radio day that wasn’t artificial or influenced by artificial intelligence were the short messages. Otherwise, music played in the morning that was completely generated by AI software, later in the day “real” songs from playlists were broadcast, compiled by another AI.
Cloned voices, artificially generated music
ChatGPT and other AI programs wrote the texts of the moderators. However, they did not perform them themselves, but rather their voices were cloned using voice synthesis software from the Ukrainian company Respeecher, which mainly works for the film industry. The synthetic moderator voices conducted interviews generated via ChatGPT and text-to-speech tools with the voices of ex-US Presidents Obama and Trump, which were also cloned. Among other things, it dealt with humorous Swiss stereotypes: the Obama voice clone talked about Swiss and American chocolate; Trump’s fake voice, also in French, praised Swiss politics – it’s brilliant, but like Swiss watches, nobody really understands how it works.
The radio station is not a news station, explains Couleur 3 director Antoine Multone to Heise Online, “but focuses on culture, music and humor”. The editors of Couleur 3 were aware that there had recently been a stir in Germany about an interview with Michael Schumacher that was also faked by AI, adds Multone. The editor-in-chief of the newspaper with the made-up interview ultimately cost her her job.
But in order not to mislead anyone too much, the radio station’s audience was informed about the experiment every 20 minutes by a voice that was also cloned. The radio station often plays a pioneering role in the field of new technologies within the RTS broadcasting group. The information was all the more necessary because Couleur 3 listeners were not informed about the project in advance. On the day of the experiment, a television crew from the RTS group let passers-by listen to the current program on the street and wanted to know whether they had noticed anything special. No, they mostly answered.
reactions of the audience
The listeners were also asked to send their impressions to the studio via WhatsApp. The text and audio messages flowed into Friday’s programming to continue the discussion, which culminated in three Couleur 3 specials. In the course of the morning alone, several hundred messages were received from the audience. Reactions ranged from “I didn’t hear much of a difference” to “There are people who are easier to replace than others.” Others were “amazed at what you can accomplish with this tool”. Some “fell for it sometimes, but it’s a bit weird and the jokes are shallow.” But most found: “Definitely no substitute for humans”, and also: “Give us back our humans!”
According to Couleur 3 boss Antoine Multone, this radio promotion is a world first. The AI-based radio station “RadioGPT” already exists, but it uses completely artificial voices and does not clone real human voices like Couleur 3 does.
Use AI in an “ethical framework”
Couleur 3 had been preparing for this special day for three months. “Two for research and conception and one month for content production,” says Multone. The broadcaster tested a dozen different AI solutions and selected five. Pascal Crittin, director of the broadcasting group RTS, adds: “The AI helps us by making certain tasks easier, saving us time and enabling more extensive and deeper research”. “But it in no way replaces the human being, his creativity, his emotions, his ability to create breaks and displacements, which are so important in Couleur 3. All the more so since the teams have prepared this day for three months”. But, according to Crittin: “RTS and the SRG (Swiss Radio and Television Company) in general want to use AI within a demanding framework of professional ethics”.
But RTS/SRG “will remain an island of verified information and will take care to offer the audience a reliable shield against fake news.” It wasn’t easy to distinguish who was speaking, a human or the AI, says Antoine Multone, Chef d’Antenna of Couleur 3. “On the other hand, this experience also shows us that creativity, surprise and humor remain very human qualities – and that reassures us.” But they wanted to “research the strengths and weaknesses of artificial intelligence,” according to a statement from the broadcaster. “So that we can deal with it better in the future. The first balance sheet shows that human intelligence remains irreplaceable.”
(tiw)
