1 of 1- RadioActive
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Would You Trust This Local Newscast If You Heard It On Your Radio?
With the era of CBS Radio News ending on Friday, many U.S. stations that have relied on it for their top of the hour news are scrambling to find a replacement. Some are going over to ABC News, which still has a radio division. (Or worse yet, Fox News.) Even WABC's owner is launching a still untested worldwide news service.
And then there's Riply. What's Riply? Believe it or not (sorry, couldn't resist), it's a brand new news service created explicitly for radio. But it comes with a difference - it's almost all generated by A.I.
The system gathers local news from what it calls "verified" sources, writes it into copy and then - here's the secret sauce - hands it over to a human editor, who presumably will go over it for accuracy and fact checking before it goes out to a station.
You can either have your news read by a team of professional (but of of market) announcers or an A.I.-created voice. And the cost is cheaper than other such audio offerings - just $198 a month for the basic service.
"Riply gathers, structures and updates news from a proprietary network of curated sources. “It transforms fragmented community signals into broadcast-ready content, powered by technology with human editorial oversight,” the company says.
“Riply was built to restore access to local content, combining the speed and assistance of AI with human editorial judgment, so stations can deliver accurate, relevant news in real time.”
Would you want this at a station you listen to? Would you trust it? Not sure I would, but it does appear to be where the industry is heading.
Riply Offers AI-Assisted News for Radio
- Fjiri
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Re: Would You Trust This Local Newscast If You Heard It On Your Radio?
It definitely appears to be where the news industry is headed. But the big question is, if all of the human journalists are let go in favour of news aggregating AI, where will AI get its news from?!
Sure, a Riply or AI software can scrape updates from social media, where opinion and hyperbole, not verified facts, run rampant. But will AI do on-the-ground reporting for a story? Will it interview the relatives of an accident or assault victim, press the mayor's office for comment on an explosive scandal, or receive insider information about an unscrupulous company from a trusted source? Or will everything simply become social media AI slop.
- Dale Patterson
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Re: Would You Trust This Local Newscast If You Heard It On Your Radio?
Presumably the human editors will quietly disappear, to cut costs, and we'll just have A.I. Nobody will notice, and nobody will care.
"Life without echo is really no life at all." - Dan Ingram
- RadioActive
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Re: Would You Trust This Local Newscast If You Heard It On Your Radio?
Also, it's cheaper than other news sources. And we all know how the big conglomerates love to save money, even if it means sacrificing quality and accuracy. Not to mention workers.
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Thread Starter- Shorty Wave
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Re: Would You Trust This Local Newscast If You Heard It On Your Radio?
RadioActive wrote:
Also, it's cheaper than other news sources. And we all know how the big conglomerates love to save money, even if it means sacrificing quality and accuracy. Not to mention workers.
Exactly RA. However, it would appear that not everyone is thrilled about AI. We are in the graduation season and apparently AI is a huge topic for many ceremonial speeches and many of the speakers are being booed. The workforce of the future sees the downside of this technology and I don’t blame them.
I found at least ten articles in seconds online about this happening, I’ve included one here. I only wish I was more positive about this, I was back when the internet first came along, loved it in fact! But AI will kill jobs and we all know it. Not great for young graduates at all. Plus the energy required to run these systems is staggering.
Time to go shout at the clouds…..!