Transforming Airwaves: RadioGPT's Role in Automating 250 Major US Radio Stations

0:00Radio just might be the next area to be completely disrupted from chat GPT and a lot of these AI technologies so recently there is a new product or project coming out called radio gpt which essentially makes it i would say pretty easy to replace human djs with bots and essentially what this new um you know radio gpt could do is that it can do most of the work required to manually run a radio station and it does it all without human labor so according to their website it uses gpt4 powered bots that can pretty much perform different charts it can work with them on the music lineup the local radio the news and it can even field listeners comments and questions which is pretty interesting radio gpt can also do a lot of the tasks that would otherwise just essentially be like in the domain of like interns or kind of the entry level staffers so it can do things like creating complimentary blog posts or converting live shows into podcasts and social media right and it really is automating a lot of the tasks that are done at a radio station.

1:07So unlike other projects like AI Radio, which I think The Verge reported on last month, which is just kind of more like a fun thought experiment, this is actually a legitimate product. And apparently it's going to debut next month with Alpha Media and Rogers Sports and Media, which represents about 250 radio stations in the US and Canada. So this is going to be actually widely rolled out. The CEO, his name is Daniel Enstandig, and he told Axios that the product isn't really meant to, I guess, well, the way they're positioning it is that it's going to save the radio, not compete with it, and that it's going to be, you know, filling the hours that radio stations can't man anyways, right?

1:51So you think like the super late nights and all that kind of stuff where they don't have people. He says, what we're looking to do is augment a station's ability to fill its programming with more live and local content. And the way that he kind of positions it is that pretty much any radio station can use AI to do all this extra stuff they were unable to do before. And, you know, that might be true in some cases, but also the companies that have signed up for this aren't exactly like these little indie radio stations. so I'm actually thinking it's going to be more likely that radio companies are going to have this opportunity to use this as a way to cut their labor forces and essentially make radio programs radio stations a lot cheaper and you know a lot of people think that that's obviously this company says thinks that's controversial and doesn't and says that's not their goal right they're going to do this this other thing but you know in my opinion why would a radio station that implement something like this and see it you know automate all of these different radio programs and all this different stuff why would they continue to pay hosts at all hours of the day to run live and do all this stuff and inevitably you know there's probably going to be still live people running these radio stations because they don't want it to just seem like a completely bot run thing however if you really have all of the more mundane small tasks automated with chat gpt like ais um it's very easy in my opinion it would be very easy to have maybe one person run an entire radio station where maybe they just do um you know ad spots or they talk um between things or they announce the new program and the whole thing can be kind of automated or run by ai but they have someone saying hey thanks for joining us today top of the hour blah blah blah blah like someone can go and just record a spiel and um you know there's one company that's going to be on 250 different radio stations or they're integrating with 250 radio stations.

3:42So I don't see why they couldn't have five, six, seven, eight, maybe 10 people man all 250 of those radio stations once they get AI to automate most tasks. So it'll be interesting to see what happens in the radio industry. And you know, this is something that obviously has already been dwindling in recent years when you have technology like Spotify that does automatic playlist recommendations, and you have everything that Apple Music is doing. personally I don't really love listening to the radio a lot because it's just a way that I have to listen to ads so I would obviously prefer just listening to my own pre-built or Spotify created playlists when I'm going driving I'll just throw that on the Bluetooth on my car or whatever so it's gonna be interesting to see how relevant radios stay it's obviously a sector that has been you know shrinking or struggling and perhaps this automation might be the final nail in the coffin and for the industry.

4:35Or maybe it's just a way for a lot of these companies to continue to stay relevant. And maybe more radio stations will pop up because now it's cheaper to run them. It'll be interesting to follow and see what happens in the radio space in the future.