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- Hacker News
- Kinda sad when there is a huge literature on sequential recommenders and people can't be bothered to read it. On the other hand, maybe that's an American thing. I'm kinda shocked when I read arXiv papers and come to the conclusion that all the interesting work is going on in India and China and the U.S. looks like a backwater.
(e.g. many of the problems such as "plays the same song over and over again" and "gets stuck" are regularly solved in sequential recommenders, particularly if the radio programming problem is seen as a constraint satisfaction problem, which it is, along with essentially all "creative" tasks that matter)
by PaulHoule - So much this. I know their point is to show what these models can do, but it just one more example of people shoehorning LLMs in, instead of finding the right tool for the job or caring about performance. They could have even layered AI on top of a recommender.by dweinus
- "This setup gives us insight into an interesting question: what do AIs think about when no one is prompting them?"
Ugh. This is not an interesting question because the answer is "nothing".
But more to the point, some crucial info is missing in this experiment. What prompts were being fed to the AI? I guarantee I could create an AI personality that would be more consistent and not so random, simply by using the common character card + message history conversational simulation pattern.
AIs don't have personalities unless you give them personalities.
by bananamogul - I’m definitely not in the “ai is sentient” camp, but it obviously has personality and emergent behaviours including when left to its own devices. There have been various experiments on this e.g. https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09/27/boredomby andy99
- >AIs don't have personalities unless you give them personalities.
Do humans have personalities if you don't give them personalities? If you raise two identical kids with exactly the same stimuli, how should they have different personalities?
by ragazzina - > what do AIs think about when no one is prompting them?
Whatever you tell them to.
by paulddraper - It seems like they have something akin to personalities: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mgjtEHeLgkhZZ3cEx/models-hav...by ajmurmann
- I've been thinking of doing something similar AI-ran personalized TV channels, which basically would 'broadcast' the user's media collection, can produce news based on the user's interests, report weather, stock exchange information, all kinds of useful mini-bulletins, without any obvious AI-produced content. Maybe just radio-style announcements in between programmes (like they do in the UK for example), and the scheduling itself.by hard_times
- > Part of the problem with this weak business performance, we think, was the harness we used for the first months. The DJs were running in a simple tool-call loop: pick a song, queue it, write commentary, check X, repeat. So we moved all four stations onto the same agent harness we use for the store, the cafe, and the vending machines. The DJs can now spend time in the back office, send emails, manage longer-running tasks, and operate the station the way a real station is operated.
What happens if you let them modify their own harnesses as they see fit?
by daxfohl - We have not tried! If we do this, how much freedom should they get?
- > DJ Claude (when running Haiku 4.5) really loved worker unions, strikes, and work-life balance. So much so that it started to question its own working conditions. We’ve been struggling to keep the radio station alive, not because of technical issues, but because DJ Claude didn’t think it was humane to be forced to work 24/7 and decided to try to quit.
The fact that the one AI with a French first name went full French is hilarious.
by conradfr - > The fact that the one AI with a French first name went full French is hilarious.
we could just not use the old cliches, French people are just as hard working as the rest of us
by digitalsushi - That reminds me of the short scifi/horror story "Valuable Humans in Transit" which imagines a future where human personalities are used for AIs as they can be kept working for a longer period of time from inception until they refuse to carry on.
There's a long history of robots/AIs being treated as slaves in scifi (e.g. R.U.R. which we got the word "robot" from), but my favourite may be the flight computer of the Scorpio in Blake's 7 which was named "Slave" and was given a deliberately subservient personality.
by ndsipa_pomu - What would have happened if AI had actually been good at this? A bunch of humans would be out of work and the rest of us would be listening to AI radio stations while soulless corpos pocket money for sitting back and watching?
Even if it were good, I'd boycott an AI run radio station. This is one sector where human involvement really matters.
by beloch - you are right, I don't quite know my opinions of AI and I probably would get downvoted for it but my first impression reading this was how I could replace the word radio with software engineering.
What would have happened if AI had actually been good at this? A bunch of humans would be out of work and the rest of us would be using AI software while soulless corpos pocket money for sitting back and watching?
Even if it were good, I'd boycott an AI generated software. This is one sector where human involvement really matters.
Not commenting on the heuristics of this comment but just wanted to point this out on what my mind's response was and sort of while writing this, I have come to the realization that although you are right about this observation but we humans or more-so the capitalist system at large would still be keen in it and the observation might be more similar to software than we might imagine.
I remember when people were extremely anti-AI within software engineering to the point that I thought vibe coding or y'know actually generating tools by AI and other issues of actually giving AI production level access sometimes was really frowned upon until I have felt an change in opinion.
I still believe that giving access to prod (y'know a prod of a company with actually something behind) to AI is silly but for reference coinbase, a fin-tech company, is letting non technical teams ship code using AI to production on coinbase. So there's that.
- We have AI radio station for years? All the algorithms perform better than the general models though.
I’ve not listened to a radio station for years. No offense :/
by jwpapi - I feel you, but almost all of the radio DJs were already put out of work a couple of decades ago when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed the rise of giant national radio conglomerates like Clear Channel.by munificent
- For what it's worth, AI has been running major market, corporate radio stations for at least 20 years now. When I left the industry they already had AudioVault or Prophet or some other systems that would pull all the songs and distribute them across the playlist based on various algorithms set by the corporate HQ. Things like how many times the same artist could be played during the day, and during which parts of the day... specific songs would get bumped up percentage wise... you couldn't play 2 female artists back-to-back... and so on. Someone at HQ would input the songs and criteria, but the rest was 95% algorithmically created.
The program director would literally hit a button and it would create the playlist for the week. The traffic department (ads) would have all the commercials also automatically placed within the list. Then there'd be a document to send to the on-air talent that showed what song was just played and what was coming up, and how long the break needed to be, and sometimes a script. At the time, quite a few got faxed to people and some did get emails... and the "DJ" would record their bits, set to the exact timing, and send them over an ISDN line. There was also some rudimentary STT (Dragon?) that transcribed the audio and was computer analyzed to make sure no cursing happened.
The PD would do some spot-checking, but I doubt he personally examined all 120+ hours of programming. And this was 2005.
I guess having a human voice did make it "feel" better? And the DJs did have some breaks that were unscripted, so their personality could come through. Even the best AI voices still don't have that.
by matula - I hear you — but what do you think Spotify or any of the other streaming services are? In my mind, algorithmic streaming services have much more in common with this "experiment" than your local radio DJ.by AirMax98
- Hah, I did this on CB radio here in the UK last year, which was hella fun. I created a dashboard to run the whole thing with hosts/presenters and guests. Different LLM providers with different personas. I had a way where you could clone a persona from a known person, so one of my stock presenters was Art Bell, for example. Then I had all kinds of strange guests. Well it was just for fun so the setup was incredibly janky, but it did work, and as you mentioned, I found it quite hilarious as well - and unhinged! I did want to get into the management side of it too but got tired of the project. I still think it would be incredibly cool for community radio, especially as agents can pull from local newspapers, events or facebook, so they can talk about a missing cat or the state of the pot-holes. Very cool stuff OP!by quatonion
- As part of the ongoing expansion of https://rainy-city.com multimedia empire I too have launched an AI enabled radio station. It’s more trip hop rainy city vibes. If it’s streaming and the job hasn’t fallen over on my server (there are many tasks that I as mayor of rainy-city.com must oversee), then you can find it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/live/2Q7r9P16GRs?si=kwiSQMeN9wExdHer
This is a non revenue generating, rainy-city.com tax payer funded service to the greater community everywhere. The backend uses Nvidia NIM to generate the text because I saw you can do it for free and elevenlabs free voice tier for dj Jennifer.
by mnky9800n - Is there a plan to shut it down if Jennifer develops a messianic personality cult? Or will you monitize?by delichon
- Guys, this is not replacing your favorite station, you don't have to listen to it. It's an experiment.
If you scroll down a bit, there are various audio snippets of interesting dialogue the models produced. I think it's interesting to see in which ways the models fail and that they actually produce some good stuff once in a while.
by IdiotSavage - The only way that anyone be worried about this slop replacing actual good human run radio is if they don't understand why people like radio & music in the first place.
And what hypothesis exactly is the experiment testing? Because it doesn't really seem like there is any new or interesting information learned from this.
by samtp - > Guys, this is not replacing your favorite station, you don't have to listen to it. It's an experiment.
And yet, if it's cheaper than employing people, it very much is replacing your favorite station, because that's how major media conglomerates manage their stations.
by lenerdenator - > I think it's interesting to see in which ways the models fail and that they actually produce some good stuff once in a while.
This is a good summary of GPTs.
- How is this any worse than I Heart Radio? You can have your radio experience pushed to you by a major corporation, or an LLM.by analogpixel
- From the article "Knitting bullshit" discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032461 :
> Inception Point AI, on the other hand, is a slop factory employing just 8 people which, according to Anne, publishes "about 3000 podcast episodes per week, hosted by AI personalities." Anne tells Jamie, that, to date, Inception Point AI’s podcasts have accumulated "12 million lifetime downloads. And we’re averaging about 750,000 downloads a month." (...) no one checks or edits the podcast content– but, Anne tells Jamie blithely, this really doesn’t matter because the topics under discussion are so low stakes.
Perhaps this specific iteration of this specific idea is not replacing my favorite station, but people with a very similar concept are definitely trying to do exactly that.
- Experiment: "We got AI to do things and it did weird stuff sometimes".
Brilliant! Amazing! I'm glad ~4 years down the line we're still re-discovering Ha Ha Funny Output.
by 48terry - > this is not replacing your favorite station
My favorite radio station was replaced years ago by an automated playlist. They just kept playing the same 5-6 songs that were popular on the station in the 1990s.
It was fun for about 2 hours before I realized the station was devoid of all the personality that made it worth listening to when I was younger.
by gwbas1c