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 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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 in Krakow.

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, the 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: O pen 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 more than a decade to guide drivers using the Polish version of Google Maps. His replacement by a metallic computer-generated voice in 2020 stirred fury on social media, prompting Google to restore Juszkiewicz, at least for a time.

He announced recently that he had been yanked again, lamenting that AI was “sweeping through the world of human voice work like a giant steamroller. And I can, in my own human voice, say, probably for the last time: ‘Smile beautifully and head south.’”

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 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.

A member of the government also expressed alarm. The minister of digitalisation, Krzysztof Gawkowski, complained on the social media platform X that “although I am a fan of AI development, I believe that certain boundaries are being crossed more and more”. He added: “The widespread use of AI must be done for people, not against them!”

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 and their replacement by music created and performed by humans.

Among the AI presenters removed from Off Radio Krakow was Alex Szulc, a nonexistent person who had been presented as a nonbinary progressive “full of social commitment”. A biography on the station’s website was later rewritten to delete any mention of the presenter’s sexual orientation after angry complaints from LGBTQ activists that they needed a real person to speak for them, not a computer-generated one.

New York Times News Service