AI in the Mass Media

AI-generated radio content, with avatar announcers, is a spreading trend, adopted by stations to run their programming alongside their traditional radio formats with human announcers. Early technological advancements in radio transmission dovetailed with the rise and spread of pop culture in the 1920s, allowing it to spread more broadly to all kinds of audiences—more so than any other previous technology, because it gave people (literate and non-literate) access to all kinds of information and aesthetic programming, thus reshaping the “typographic brain,” as Marshall McLuhan called it, accustomed to reading materials for delectation and engagement. The radio retrieved a form of orality, based on the human voice. With the spread of TV as a mass medium in the 1950s the communal brain was rewired again to glean meaning from images through the new medium. It is not clear from the contemporary research if AI media will affect the brain in new ways, but there is no reason to think that they will not. This chapter will deal with AI-based changes in radio, podcasting, and television programming, which may be recalibrating the importance assigned to such media in the delivery of cultural content.