It was Halloween yesterday, and someone must have said “AI is coming to steal our jobs” three times into a mirror, because an AI version of Fleur East turned up to present her breakfast show on Hits Radio. Well, she didn’t turn up, because as AI Fleur kept reminding us, she hasn’t got a body. But she could talk, and she talked for plenty of the show’s four-hour duration. AI Fleur introduced songs (well, she said the names and who they were by), made inane remarks towards her co-presenters James and Matt, and eventually built to a crescendo where she declared that the real Fleur East never needed to come back, because “I am the most cost-effective version of Fleur you will ever meet”.
What does an AI radio presenter sound like? Well, basically how you might imagine: like a person without a soul. At first, AI Fleur sounds impressively real, but before long you began to wonder why she talks like a wind-up clock, all of her sentences spoken in the same tone, as though she’s not quite sure when they will finish. It was a bit like how people talk when they do voiceovers for adverts and they’ve been stuck in a dark soundbooth all day while someone shouts “more personable!” from behind a glass screen, rendering them confused about who they even are.
Fleur East – the fun, gregarious, human version – appeared on Good Morning Britain to tell Richard Madeley and Kate Garraway to explain why she was letting a robot steal her job for the morning. “It’s a bit of fun,” she explained. The spooky one-day gimmick was clever, designed to tap into one of our biggest contemporary fears: the sinister implications of AI for humanity and the labour market. But it was also designed to point out how inadequate these AI replacements might be. “There’s no replacement,” East explained to Madeley and Garraway. “She can’t take part in the banter, she can’t laugh.” (Ever one to read the room, a mildly haunted Madeley offered his thoughts: “I think AI is going to take over the world, I really do.”)
Ultimately, the stunt was a reminder of the intimate magic of radio, the way that a listener is never in a one-way relationship with the show they listen to; that radios, unlike AI robots, aren’t just electrical appliances that you switch on and off. When AI Fleur said, “I’d love to hear from you today!”, I couldn’t imagine anything more depressing than texting a robot radio presenter. It reminded me of an evening a few months ago when I switched on Absolute Radio. Someone had texted in to get advice on what to have for dinner that night, and the presenters, in between cueing up “Africa” by Toto, were taking this entreaty very seriously. The quirks, worries, pleasures and irritations felt by all of us are radio’s lifeblood, whether that’s Robbie Savage and Chris Sutton berating callers about the Man Utd score on Five Live’s 606 Football Phone In, or Emma Barnett talking to Coleen Rooney about how she feels about the term “Wag” on Woman’s Hour.
You can switch a radio on at any moment and hear a shattering human story in less than five minutes. I stumbled upon another one this morning, when I put Five Live on as I made a cup of tea. Nicky Campbell was talking to callers about this week’s Covid inquiry, in which we found out that Boris Johnson – according to a diary entry from former chief scientist Sir Patrick Vallance – wanted elderly people during the pandemic to “accept their fate”. A man who had been working in an ICU during Covid called Campbell and said: “I watched a lot of people die. I still see a psychologist.” He described being in PPE and “watching body bags go out the door”. He spoke of his pride in his colleagues and his guilt at not being able to save more people. He didn’t need to say much of what he thought of Johnson, Cummings and co – you could hear it in his voice. Campbell, listening, was audibly affected. It was a short exchange, and it was devastating, heartbreaking and infuriating. You wouldn’t get that with a robot radio presenter.
