Polish public broadcaster Radio Kraków is facing criticism over the Tuesday relaunch of its station OFF Radio Kraków, now almost entirely the product of artificial intelligence (AI) tools – from the music selection to the hosts themselves.
Presenting the programmes now are Kuba, Emi and Alex – AI characters assigned personalities, interests, even AI-generated photos to serve as “model representatives of Generation Z,” the demographic cohort born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s. The relaunched station is now aimed at this demographic, with “interviews” from the hosts and music playlists generated by AI – even if it is overseen by a human director, one of the few actual people involved in the process. Marcin Pulit, editor-in-chief and liquidator of Radio Kraków, told Polish-language news portal Onet that the experiment would last three months, after which he would once again employ real journalists.
Pulit positions the move as “participation in the discussion about the opportunities and threats posed by artificial intelligence.” Such reassurances mean little to critics like Mateusz Demski, co-founder of OFF Radio Kraków, whose petition to the Polish government described the move as setting “a dangerous precedent that affects us all.”
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Demski is not alone. More than 18,000 people have signed on to his petition, which calls on the ombudsman, the National Broadcasting Council and the Council of Media Ethics to end this experiment on the public broadcaster. Pulit told Onet that the switch to AI was entirely financed from subscription fees, not public funds, and defended the decision as a response to the “low listenership of OFF Radio Kraków.”
The primary concerns raised by Demski and other journalists centre on the harm done to staff and listeners when programmes “created with passion and commitment, based on in-depth and committed conversations” are replaced by AI-generated content. By having a station rely almost entirely on AI, he argues in the petition, Radio Kraków is opening the gateway to a world in which experienced media and creative sector employees “are replaced by machines,” as well as to a world of false appearances.Such fears appear warranted. One of the AI hosts recently “interviewed” Nobel Prize-winning poet and essayist Wisława Szymborska – who has been dead for over a decade. AI gave voice to Szymborska’s manufactured responses, putting Radio Kraków “one step away from deep-fake interviews,” warned Polish former journalist Zaneta Gotowalska-Wróbleska on X. Reports do not indicate whether Szymborska’s estate gave permission for use of her likeness.
