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.
