As media executives wrestle with the usage of synthetic intelligence, radio big iHeartMedia needs to face out.
“We don’t use AI-generated personalities. We don’t play AI music that options artificial vocalists pretending to be human,” Tom Poleman, the corporate’s programming chief, wrote in an electronic mail to staff.
“The podcasts we publish are additionally Assured Human,” he wrote.
Radio station DJs now are anticipated to say “Assured Human,” as a part of their hourly on-air disclosures, which embody saying the station’s name letters, as required by the Federal Communications Fee. The brand new branding marketing campaign has its roots in iHeartMedia’s analysis that listeners activate the radio for extra than simply music and knowledge.
“Shoppers aren’t simply searching for content material, they’re searching for connection,” the corporate’s president of insights, Lainie Fertick, wrote in an October weblog publish. “In a world of tech overload, customers are trying to find one thing actual.”
The transfer comes as Hollywood creators, brokers and executives come to grips with speedy advances in synthetic intelligence, which has assisted staff with routine duties but in addition precipitated a stir with the discharge of reasonable AI actors, equivalent to Tilly Norwood, which has greater than 66,000 followers on Instagram. Leisure behemoths, together with Walt Disney Co. and Comcast’s NBCUniversal, even have sued AI firms for copyright infringement.
To make certain, iHeartMedia makes use of “AI-powered productiveness and distribution instruments that assist scale our enterprise operations,” Poleman wrote in his observe. Such AI instruments are used for “scheduling, viewers insights, knowledge evaluation, workflow automation, present prep, enhancing and group,” he mentioned.
iHeartMedia is the nation’s largest radio operator with greater than 850 stations, together with KFI-AM 640, KLAC-AM 570, KOST-FM 103.5 and KIIS-FM 102.7 in Los Angeles.
The corporate additionally has a rising podcast enterprise, producing such reveals as “Stuff You Ought to Know,” “Questlove Supreme” and “Drama Queens.” It additionally co-produces podcasts with the NFL, NBA and Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland Audio, which incorporates “The Laverne Cox Present.”
Beforehand generally known as Clear Channel Communications, the corporate has skilled the darkish facet of automation and programming centralization.
In 2002, its radio stations in Minot, N.D., aired canned music as a poisonous cloud blanketed the neighborhood after a prepare transporting anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer derailed and exploded. One particular person died, and dozens of others have been injured. Congress then drilled into alleged harms of media consolidation and the failure of broadcasters to alert the neighborhood through the catastrophe in Minot, the place Clear Channel owned six of the eight industrial radio stations.
Clear Channel later mentioned native police failed that night time to activate the emergency alert system, which might have allowed the printed of particular bulletins.
The corporate has since championed its responses to different disasters. An iHeart spokesperson pointed to its award-winning protection of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, N.C., in 2024 in addition to its efforts through the devastating Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires in January, “delivering essential lifesaving info and dealing with native organizations to gather and distribute important catastrophe aid provides,” the spokesperson mentioned. “At iHeart, we make service to our communities our primary precedence.”
iHeartMedia, like different leisure and information retailers, is coping with promoting declines, and it has been searching for methods to maintain listeners engaged amid media fragmentation. The corporate this fall reduce a number of workers members at historic KFI, together with Morris “Mo” O’Kelly, who had hosted the station’s night speak present for almost three years.
Radio host Chuck Dizzle additionally introduced on Instagram that he’d been laid off from iHeart’s Los Angeles hip-hop station KRRL-FM, which manufacturers itself as “Actual 92.3.”
The corporate mentioned its analysis reveals that buyers crave interactions with actual folks, they usually have deep issues concerning the rising use of AI and its potential societal adjustments.
Poleman pointed to a latest survey that confirmed two-thirds of respondents have been frightened about shedding their job to AI.
iHeartMedia staff ought to embrace “Assured Human” as greater than a advertising and marketing tagline, Poleman wrote.
“When listeners work together with us, they know they’re connecting with actual voices, actual tales, and actual emotion,” Poleman wrote. “Typically it’s important to decide a facet — we’re on the facet of people.”
