Incident 833: Polish Radio Station Replaces Human Hosts with AI-Generated Presenters to Simulate Interviewing Deceased Poet Wisława Szymborska

Description: Polish radio station Off Radio Krakow replaced human presenters with AI-generated ones and aired a simulated interview with the deceased poet Wisława Szymborska. The AI-driven experiment aimed to attract younger listeners but led to job losses for former hosts. In response to the public backlash, the station ended its use of AI presenters.

Editor Notes: Michal Rusinek, who operates the foundation that runs Wisława Szymborska's estate, reportedly gave permission for her voice to be used, but he later expressed disappointment with the outcome, describing the AI-generated interview as “horrible” and saying it made Szymborska sound "bland" and "naïve." Rusinek noted that, while Szymborska herself might have found humor in the experiment, the interview misrepresented her tone and personality. Regardless of Rusinek's role and response, Incident 833 still raises thorny problems about the ethical dimensions of using AI to recreate the voices of deceased individuals, along with all the potential and actual harms that result from eroding transparency and truth in media platforms. See also Incident 627: Unauthorized AI Impersonation of George Carlin Used in Comedy Special.

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Alleged: OpenAI , ElevenLabs and Leonardo AI developed an AI system deployed by Off Radio Krakow and Mariusz Marcin Pulit, which harmed Lukasz Zaleski , Mateusz Demski , Wisława Szymborska , Off Radio Krakow audience and Off Radio Krakow employees.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

833

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-10-21

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Polish radio station abandons use of AI 'presenters' following outcry

abcnews.go.com

An ‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.

nytimes.com

abcnews.go.com · 2024

WARSAW, Poland -- A Polish radio station said Monday that it has ended an “experiment” that involved using AI-generated "presenters" instead of real journalists after the move sparked an outcry.

Weeks after dismissing its journalists, OFF R…

nytimes.com · 2024

When a state-funded Polish radio station canceled a weekly show featuring interviews with theater directors and writers, the host of the program went quietly, resigned to media industry realities of cost-cutting and shifting tastes away fro…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.