Ask the internet, “What does Abraham Lincoln going over Niagara Falls in a barrel look like?” A moment later, your computer will happily reply with a series of weirdly drawn images with weirdly drawn fingers.
This is the initial experience most people have with artificial intelligence or, colloquially, AI.
While widespread rollout of AI is still fairly new to the general public, radio has been working with AI tools for some time now, developing ways to get more creative, more efficient and more relatable to our audience.
Let me present four ways that AI could better be used in radio … or not.
Lookin’ good
Listeners have a mental picture — often erroneous — of what they want their favorite air personality to look like, based on the sound of their voice.
[Related: “Al Peterson Retires (or So He Says)”]
AI can come to the rescue by analyzing the tonality, timbre and regional dialect of a particular jock or talk host and create an idealized web image of what they should look like.
While this will not work for everyone, it will finally give me the chiseled 6’7”, wavy-haired, perpetually 35-year-old appearance I have been aching for my entire career.
Now this message
AI already writes, voices and mixes radio ads, often with somewhat underwhelming results. The next generation of AI can make commercials honest.
In the case of a local pizza restaurant, we can forcibly cram an entire pizza into the DVD drive of a client computer and let the software go to town on it. Scouring social sites across the entire webscape, AI can create an ad from the harvested information.
Which means your station can soon be running an ad that will inadvertently say, “Downtown Pizza — home of the one-star pizza that ‘OldHippy1955’ called ‘school fingerpaint on a piece of sheet rock.’”
I can fix it
Contract engineering has essentially done away with the fulltime First-Class-ticket in-house engineer employed by the station owner. But that also meant eliminating the person who normally fixes toilet leaks, keeps the gutters clear, anticipates when something keeping the station on the air is on the verge of failing … essentially, the person who keeps the place glued together.
AI can scrape information on metallurgy, local water purity and mineral conditions, previous billed plumber visits and frequency of common issues within your Zip Code. Armed with that information, it will predict the exact day and time that leaky copper elbow under the sink in the ladies’ room will corrode to the point of requiring replacement.
Only THEN will it send a text to the unemployed former engineer to come in and solder in a new one. Just as they would have done anyway.
Call now to win
Put AI completely in charge of promotions. Looking way ahead on the calendar, it will see that there is, say, a solar eclipse coming. It will generate a T-shirt design with a stylized station logo, automatically order (and pay for) 500 shirts, rent a stadium for a Watch Party and schedule on-air giveaway promos.
While it’s doing that, it will also analyze historical regional weather records, factor in climate change, extrapolate future trends in the weather and determine it is going to be a cloudy day. And will cancel the promotion before it happens.
But not before management tries like mad to cancel the rental check on that stadium and takes delivery on $1,800 worth of now-useless T-shirts. With a design that actually infringes on another station’s prior artwork.
The Beatles said it best in 1967: “It’s getting better all the time, can’t get no worse.” We’re still in the stone ax stage of AI for radio, so we really should see where this ride takes us and not just fall for the pretty shiny things.
Got your own ideas about how to use AI around your station? Email [email protected].
Alan Peterson is a semi-retired 48-year radio pro and has written for RW since 1989. He hosts “The Midday Show” on WMBG(AM), Williamsburg, Va. He proudly states this article was “written completely by a human, using only open-source software also written by humans.”
