AUDIO: AUSTRALIAN RADIO STATION CAUGHT USING A.I. DJ
[We don’t know if you want to air this story; there might be a lot of awkward confessions that would have to be made about voice tracking and such. We present it mainly for you real-life DJs (And bless you for still existing!). We thought you might find it frighte— er. interesting.]
An Australian radio station is facing backlash after being caught using an AI-generated host for the last six months without disclosing it. Radio CADA (pronounced ‘KAY-duh’) created a host called Thy (pronounced ‘thigh’) using artificial intelligence software. They gave her – or it – a show called The Workdays with Thy (four hours a day Monday through Friday), but did not mention on its website or promotional materials that Thy was not a real person. Thy’s true nature only came to light after a local blogger questioned whether Thy was a real person. She was not able to find any biographical information on Thy. Plus, audio analysis of voice clips revealed that Thy sounded identical when saying the words “old school” across different shows. The station subsequently acknowledged the use of AI to create the voice of Thy, but also noted that the fake DJ has real fans, despite not being a real person. ElevenLabs, the tech company behind the voice, said they were “pushing the boundaries of what ‘live radio’ even means.” They said the voice was modeled off a woman who works in their accounting department, but did not say whether they paid her, or who – if anyone – writes Thy’s scripts.
* This is not the story to go running to your station owner with.
* Luckily, this is the only radio station on earth using a fake AI DJ.
* Sorry, but now that over 50% of YouTube narrations are AI, I’m finding it hard to get upset.
* Honestly, our boss is too cheap to even go the AI route. We are actually all a bunch of trained parrots.
CLIP: Here is why Thy sounds like.
