Guys, this is not replacing your favorite station, you don't have to listen to it. It's an experiment.
If you scroll down a bit, there are various audio snippets of interesting dialogue the models produced. I think it's interesting to see in which ways the models fail and that they actually produce some good stuff once in a while.
> this is not replacing your favorite station
My favorite radio station was replaced years ago by an automated playlist. They just kept playing the same 5-6 songs that were popular on the station in the 1990s.
It was fun for about 2 hours before I realized the station was devoid of all the personality that made it worth listening to when I was younger.
The playlists of nearly all radio stations are far too short for me. I finally just quit listening to the radio.
Comcast has a bunch of channels with various music categories. They all repeat after about 2 days. So much for that.
With all the zillions of songs available, I don't get why they do that.
You've got to find the rare radio stations with public support and human djs. kexp.org is a great one based out of Seattle with a wild variety of shows and decades of history. Are all the shows to my taste? No. Have I ever heard something being played that was total crap? Honestly, maybe? Because there's genres I don't know enough to gaugue quality, but I haven't twigged to it.
The dial on my receiver is permanently on 90.3 FM. Such a good radio station. I remember one fun drive a couple of years back was themed around “Don‘t let the robots win”[1]. Perhaps it is already time to re-use that theme.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/KEXP/comments/1459ahb/dont_let_the_...
Money probably? That's the number of song licensed to maximize profit without hurting 80% listeners.
Have you tried KING 98.1? They seem to have a vast playlist.
My local: https://threedradio.com/
("My" meaning local to me, not that it belongs to me)
It’s like people don’t realize that the “hits” played on radio are entirely manufactured by the music industry. They literally provide lists of songs for the radio station to play that month in order to generate interest so that then people either go play or buy or whatever those songs making them more likely to reach #1 that month. It’s entirely manufactured and people try to point to it as being “real” radio. It’s why you are only likely to hear this months new hit and one or maybe two of the previous month or two “hits” from the same artist in the rotation, if they are popular enough with the focus groups to be promoted. (Outside of their older songs.) Then they play it on repeat to make people think they like it, because everyone else is liking it and it’s making its way to number one!
People are so easily manipulated and then they will go argue with others about it.
(Point of clarification, that’s not to say people can’t like songs. However, if I gave you a hundred similar songs from unknown artists and didn’t tell you which is which, it’s questionable whether people would have any interest in said popular song.)
You should find some better radio stations. There are tons of independent stations the play excellent non top 40 music and have been for years.
This is like saying the the movies that people like are manipulated but only focusing on what is played at big box theaters.
You're missing the point. Radio was consolidated into Clear Channel and took away what made radio radio. Local radio. Like what made Chicago jazz different from New York jazz etc. Not internet stations that may as well be podcasts. Regional culture.
You are missing the very simple point: there are tons of independent stations the play excellent non top 40 music and have been for years.
Just because you don't choose to tune into them doesn't mean they don't exist. And it also doesn't mean that those who do should lover their standards for what constitutes good radio.
On actual radio waves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_independent_radio_stat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_radio_stations...
^ One of those might be in your area :)
kexp.org in Seattle and San Francisco for a start.
Yes.
What stations? All of the stations I can pick up in my area are top 40 country, rock, and pop, + npr.
Do you live near a city? Because pretty much every major city has a few. KEXP, WPFW, WUSC, KNHC are all local stations playing interesting non top 40 music that have been operating for decades in places that I have lived. Dublab & The Lot radio are also really good over the internet.
If there are non around you just pick a random place in the world here and listen: https://radio.garden
It's certainly 100x better than corporate and/or AI slop streams
I don't live near a big city and that's the point I'm trying to make. Yes I know the Internet exists. That isn't radio.
Case in point. “Independent stations are totally better and I’m going to go argue on the internet when it’s something completely unrelated to small independent stations, unlike the mass media market stations the vast majority of people in the world ACTUALLY listen to.” Bravo, you are very unique and original, you special snowflake you.
You should go DJ at one of those independent radio stations and play some rather filthy uncensored songs, and let me know exactly how your programming “didn’t get manipulated”. I’m sure you won’t get fined…probably…which makes it totally the reality that independent stations are totally independent without any sort of manipulation. Sheep, meet shepherd.
> You should go DJ at one of those independent radio stations
I have for years.
> and play some rather filthy uncensored songs, and let me know exactly how your programming “didn’t get manipulated”.
What on earth are you talking about.
Honestly your reply comes across as extremely insecure and just weird.
Insecure people tend to think such things when called on their ignorance. Can’t be helped. What can be helped is trying to understand what is being said before attempting to discount it with an example that is just as manipulated in other ways, in order to maintain their ability to broadcast and not be fined. Beyond that, it’s pretty clear that the comment and the prior comment it supported was in reference to mass market radio, not tiny broadcasters with audiences reaching wholes of thousands. But sure.
Yeah and my entire point is that the quality standard that artificial intelligence developers should be aiming for is not soulless corporate mass market media. Because our world world is already swimming that nonsense. So there's absolutely nothing novel in finding a new way to create beige bs.
Once again, I have no idea what you're talking about when talking about fines or manipulation, I'm talking about quality. But it seems pretty damn clear at this point that you have never listened to any local independent radio station.
You should really try it out sometime. It's a lot better. And it'll save you from calling people snowflakes because you feel insecure about what type of radio stations they like.
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Radio stations are like baseball games. I listen for all the unusual moments, not the core baseball game. That’s actually the filler.
My first thought when I saw the headline was, "Did anyone even notice a difference?"
Experiment: "We got AI to do things and it did weird stuff sometimes".
Brilliant! Amazing! I'm glad ~4 years down the line we're still re-discovering Ha Ha Funny Output.
At this point I think many of us are similarly exhausted by this sort of trite exercise. I really don't need some VC backed startup to show me this sort of output any more, especially when the output in question is obviously boring and substandard.
> I'm glad ~4 years down the line we're still re-discovering Ha Ha Funny Output
Four years or forty millennia? So a certain extent, all whimsical art is “haha funny” result.
Yea what are they trying to test? Where is the hypothesis?
We're generally trying to test if/when AIs can run companies. Not many people know this, but Vending-Bench (our other project where AIs run vending machines) is intended as a datapoint for measuring whether AIs can acquire resources by themselves, which is a prerequisite to AIs taking over. This is similar, but now instead of a retail business, it's a media business.
They're trying to test if it's good enough to replaced the few remaining paid radio/streaming DJs yet.
I am reminded of how not even 2 weeks ago we had an “experiment” of rewriting Bun in Rust.
From the article "Knitting bullshit" discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032461 :
> Inception Point AI, on the other hand, is a slop factory employing just 8 people which, according to Anne, publishes "about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities." Anne tells Jamie, that, to date, Inception Point AI’s podcasts have accumulated "12 million lifetime downloads. And we’re averaging about 750,000 downloads a month." (...) no one checks or edits the podcast content– but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes.
Perhaps this specific iteration of this specific idea is not replacing my favorite station, but people with a very similar concept are definitely trying to do exactly that.
How is this any worse than I Heart Radio? You can have your radio experience pushed to you by a major corporation, or an LLM.
If iHeartRadio is your testible standard for radio stations than we have lost as a society.
iHeartRadio is not doing anything. A person at iHeartRadio is doing the work. Even if it’s automated, at some point a person handled it.
A person at IHeartRadio is doing the work the corporation tells them to do. do you think they want to play Hotel California on loop all day long?
Tom Petty - The Last DJ https://youtu.be/6Knw_GxXPHg
It is not the same as an LLM and I don’t understand why you’re trying to equate it.
Because the argument "at least it's a human over at iHeartRadio" is not convincing in the slightest?
Why? LLM = literally not a person. Person at a company = literally a person.
I do not understand your logic here. Let’s use a more extreme example:
* if I am flying a military drone and bomb someone I was told to bomb, am I morally culpable for pulling the trigger?
* if a company launches a military drone that is completely controlled by an LLM, is there an individual person culpable for dropping the bomb?
The only way that anyone be worried about this slop replacing actual good human run radio is if they don't understand why people like radio & music in the first place.
And what hypothesis exactly is the experiment testing? Because it doesn't really seem like there is any new or interesting information learned from this.
I think you're talking about some Platonic ideal that just doesn't exist anymore.
Streaming services such as Spotify are increasingly filled with AI-generated songs and the average consumer doesn't seem to mind because we're not listening intently in the first place: it's just a background track we're not really paying attention to. I'm pretty sure that radio execs are looking at that and are taking notes.
For talk radio... if I had a penny every time someone on HN brought up that they're enjoying NotebookLM-generated slopcasts, I'd have a neat pile of coin. And I think it's the same story: most people listen to podcasts just to kill time. Soothing, zero-calorie LLM banter will do.
there's a whole world of wonderful radio that has been thriving for decades, completely different than Spotify or talk radio.
It's unfortunate that you haven't seemed to experience any of it, but I've personally loved over the years stations like KEXP, WPFW, Dublab, WUSC
Your original post said that we shouldn't be worried because people appreciate radio and music for reasons that presumably can't be replicated by AI. I'm asserting that's not true: it's not how most people listen to radio or music, and AI content is already quite prominent.
I'm perfectly familiar with KEXP and other stations like that, but this is not how most people experience the medium. It's like insisting that Taylor Swift will never catch on because her music is not nearly as rich and complex as Wagner. Sure, but that's completely irrelevant.
Just because a lot of people like big blockbuster movies doesn't mean that's the standard that I hold good film to.
Similar to radio. If you're going to use huge amounts of processing power to create something new, it should at least be interesting and held to a standard of good for its category, not the standard of corporate slop.
So cool, you can now replace corporate slop with AI slop. For some people who like to turn into radio with no soul or personality I guess it's a win. But for people like myself who actually like to hear interesting and novel things on the radio, this is just a big exercise is creating more filler and noise in an already grayed out world.
KEXP is a local (and beloved) station for me. WIll have to give some of these others a listen if they're doing similar things.