Polish radio station abandons use of artificial “presenters” due to protests

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A Polish radio station said Monday it has ended an “experiment” that involved using artificially intelligent “anchors” instead of real journalists after the move sparked an outcry.

A few weeks after OFF Radio Krakow journalists were fired relaunched last week using virtual characters created by AI as presenters.

Across Poland, people were unhappy and expressed fears that humans were being replaced by AI.

The channel’s editor, Marcin Pulit, said in a statement on Monday that the goal was to spark debate about artificial intelligence, and that it had succeeded. He said the experiment was supposed to last three months, but he saw no point in continuing it.

“Over the course of a week, we collected so many observations, opinions and conclusions that we decided that continuation was pointless,” Pulit wrote.

He said the station was “surprised by the level of emotion surrounding this experiment, attributing to us non-existent intentions and actions, harsh judgments formulated based on false reports.”

The radio station in the southern city of Krakow said its avatars were created to reach younger listeners by talking about cultural, artistic and social issues, including LGBT+ people.

The change last week attracted national attention after Mateusz Demski, a journalist and film critic who until recently hosted a show on the channel, launched a petition calling on the network to stop the experiment and published an open letter protesting the “replacement of employees with artificial people.” intelligence.”

“This is a dangerous precedent that will hit us all,” he wrote, and said it could pave the way “to a world in which experienced workers who have worked for years in the media sector and people employed in the creative industries are replaced by machines “

The petition was signed by more than 23 thousand people.

Last Tuesday, the station aired an “interview” conducted by an artificially intelligent host whose voice impersonated Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner in literature who died in 2012.

Before canceling the experiment, the station planned to interview Polish statesman Jozef Piłsudski, who died in 1935.