So you’re using A.I. because it saves you time. Or you’re using it to save money. I mean let’s face it, that’s the real reason, right?

Radio people have been targeted for years. I’m all for saving time and saving money, heck I made a whole company around saving money for radio stations, but when it comes to people being expendable, I’m out. If a station tells me they have a full time news person, I am happy to move on my way. It’s the smaller stations with no money who I have befriended over the years. Along the way, the larger stations signed up because “they have no money”.

Now it’s Google’s latest update, AI Overviews. It’s killing publishers and could potentially kill newsrooms too. AI Overviews basically takes a news (or any) article and generates a summary. For me, this is still plagiarism, all the way. Only a human can know if they’re cribbing off of the original story. They claim “we do the work, so you don’t have to”. I feel like they should also leave the light on for me, then rub my feet. I mean, when will this stop?

One of the anchors who works for me sent me some audio of a morning show in the town where he lives. There are no longer humans on that show. The “side-kick, Sally” sounded really, really fake. You cannot fake a personality or sense of humor. She was stiff (duh, she’s not real, she’s air), and stilted, and had no audible breaths. You cannot banter and have a back and forth with Sally for she is a zero.

How far are we going to go to rid ourselves of the human personalities so they can no longer afford to work in this medium? And how will these people take care of themselves? Not only is this a chosen career, we don’t have to work in radio, but, for many of us, it would be devastatingly depressing to have to find something else to do.

No longer utility people, we are The Expendables. I say it’s time to standup against management and the machine! Let’s show them how creative we are and how unimaginative the machine is. Can a machine go to your sales meeting and shine? Can a machine light up a room with their smile? Can a machine open the radio station in the morning, turn on the coffee for the crew and welcome them in? Can it answer the phone with a smile and welcome listeners into the lobby? Or have a conversation on air that makes hundreds of thousands of people laugh on the way to their soul-sucking job?

I could go on… throw us the lifeline, we are not expendable.