Australian radio station DJ discovered to be AI-generated
Australian radio station CADA have made headlines recently after it was discovered that DJ Thy, who had a segment on the show for months, was AI-generated.
Thy, who hosts the daily show ‘Workdays with Thy’ on the channel, was developed using ElevenLabs technology. Every weekday from 11am-3pm, Thy played listeners “the hottest tracks from around the world”. The show has been on the air since November.
The show reached over 72,000 listeners in March but never disclosed the host’s fraudulent nature. Nonetheless, Australian radio stations will be familiar with this trend; Melbourne-based Disrupt Radio publicly uses AI DJ Debbie Disrupt on its channel.
In this case, the AI’s likeness and voice were based on a real ARN Media employee. Similarly, a Portland, Oregon-based radio show introduced AI Ashley, the cloned version of the real human host, Ashley Elzinga.
The show’s description reads: “Curated by our music experts, these are the songs that are charting or on the cusp of blowing up — hear it first with Thy so you can boast to your friends and say you were all over it first.” This suggests that Artificial Intelligence is ahead of trends in the music industry, being able to predict and manipulate which musicians will land well with the general public.
This only came to light after a writer questioned Thy’s identity, baffled by the lack of biographical information.
In other AI news, Electro-pop artist Imogen Heap has teamed up with AI start-up Jen, which allows fans to borrow the “vibe” of selected songs for their own creations via generative AI. Jen’s co-founder told the musicians who opt in for the service: “You’re not licensing a song so much as launching a product. You become software.”
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