From-the-grave 'interview' with Nobel winner exposes AI pitfalls

When a state-funded Polish radio station cancelled a weekly show featuring interviews with theatre directors and writers, the host of the programme went quietly, resigned to media industry realities of cost-cutting and shifting tastes away from highbrow culture.

- ANDREW HIGGINS

But his resignation turned to fury in late October after his former employer, Off Radio Krakow, aired what it billed as a "unique interview" with an icon of Polish culture, Wisława Szymborska, the winner of the 1996 Literature Nobel.

The terminated radio host, Łukasz Zaleski, said he would have invited Szymborska on his morning show himself, but never did for a simple reason: She died in 2012. The station used artificial intelligence to generate the recent interview—a dramatic and, to many, outrageous example of technology replacing humans, even dead ones.

Zaleski conceded that the computer-generated version of the poet's distinctive voice was convincing. "It was very, very good," he said, but "I went to her funeral, so I know for sure that she is dead." The technology-enabled resurrection of the dead poet was part of a novel experiment by Off Radio Krakow, an arm of Poland's public broadcasting system in the southern city of Krakow. The aim was to test whether AI could revive a moribund local station that had "close to zero" listeners, according to the head of public radio.

The station also planned from-the-grave interviews with other dead people, including Józef Piłsudski, Poland's leader when it regained its independence in 1918.