From-the-grave 'interview' with Nobel winner Szymborska exposes AI pitfalls

By Andrew Higgins

 

When a state-funded Polish radio station cancelled a weekly show featuring interviews with theatre directors and writers, the host of the programme went quietly, resigned to media industry realities of cost-cutting and shifting tastes away from highbrow culture. But his resignation turned to fury in late October after his former employer, Off Radio Krakow, aired what it billed as a “unique interview” with an icon of Polish culture, Wislawa Szymborska, the winner of the 1996 Literature Nobel. 

The terminated radio host, Lukasz Zaleski, said he would have invited Szymborska on his morning show himself, but never did for a simple reason: She died in 2012. The station used artificial intelligence to generate the recent interview — a dramatic and, to many, outrageous example of technology replacing humans, even dead ones. 

 

Zaleski conceded that the computer-generated version of the poet’s distinctive voice was convincing. “It was very, very good,” he said, but “I went to her funeral, so I know for sure that she is dead.” The technology-enabled resurrection of the dead poet was part of a novel experiment by Off Radio Krakow, an arm of Poland’s public broadcasting system in the southern city of Krakow. The aim was to test whether AI could revive a moribund local station that had “close to zero” listeners, according to the head of public radio. 

The station also planned from-the-grave interviews with other dead people, including Jozef Pilsudski, Poland’s leader when it regained its independence in 1918. 

Novelty value — and a storm of public outrage — worked to bolster Off Radio Krakow’s audience, which the head of Radio Krakow said grew to 8,000 overnight from just a handful of people after the introduction of three AI-generated Generation Z presenters — Emilia, 20, Jakub, 22, and Alex, 23, each of whom had a computer-generated photograph and biography on the station’s website. Less welcome than the audience surge, however, has been a barrage of abuse directed at the public broadcasting system and accusations that it was sacrificing humans on the altar of technology. “I have been turned into a job-killing monster who wants to replace real people with avatars,” said Mariusz Marcin Pulit, editor in chief of Radio Krakow and of niche stations operating under its umbrella, like Off Radio Krakow. 

He insisted that it was never his intention to replace people with machines, and that his only goal was to revive Off Radio Krakow, make it more appealing to younger listeners and stir debate about AI as Poland’s Parliament discusses new legislation to regulate its use. 

The technology used to generate the fake interview with Szymborska and other programming, he added, has been widely used: Open AI’s ChatGPT, speech synthesis software developed by ElevenLabs, and the image-generating programs of Leonardo.Ai. But his assurances have done nothing to calm public anger — and alarm that humans are being written out of the script. 

Among those outraged by Pulit’s experiment was Jaroslaw Juszkiewicz, a radio journalist whose voice was used for over 10 years in the Polish version of Google Maps. In a Facebook post, he said the use of AI to fake an interview with the dead Nobel Prize winner had left him speechless. “If that is not a breach of journalistic ethics,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”

The National Radio and Television Council, a regulatory body stacked with supporters of Poland’s previous Right-wing government, assailed Pulit, who was appointed by a new Centre-Left administration formed in December. He was “eliminating the human factor” and forcing the media to obey “unethical commands and ideas serving, for example, strictly political interests,” a council member, Marzena Paczuska, wrote in a letter to the culture minister. 

Tired of being accused of wanting to make humans redundant, Pulit, the head of Radio Krakow, recently pulled the plug on his AI experiment. “We are pioneers, and the fate of pioneers can be difficult,” he said in a recent message to staff members announcing an abrupt termination of AI presenters. Among those removed from Off Radio Krakow was Alex Szulc, a nonexistent person who had been presented as a nonbinary progressive “full of social commitment.” Also gone is Emilia Nowak, the station’s computer-generated “pop culture expert,” who conducted the “interview” with the dead poet. The station first announced the interview as if it were real, but later clarified that it had been fabricated by a machine.

 

Michal Rusinek, the head of a foundation that manages the late Nobel Prize winner’s literary estate, said he had given Off Radio Krakow permission to use Szymborska’s voice for the segment because the poet “had a sense of humor and would have found it funny.” 

But he said the interview “was horrible” and put words in the poet’s mouth that she would never have used, making her sound “bland,” “naïve” and of “no interest whatsoever.” But that, he added, was heartening because “it shows that A.I. does not yet work” as well as humans. “If the interview had been really good,” he said, “it would be terrifying.”

 

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