Who are your favorite radio personalities from your past? Wouldn’t it be great if you could listen to The Real Don Steele, Dan Ingram, or Dr. Don Rose every single day again playing the latest hits and yakking about current issues? What if the late, great Vin Scully still did current Dodgers games?

It’s not only possible, but it won’t be long before it happens.

I would love to hear Paul Harvey’s folksy commentary on yet another Trump-Biden election. (I’d love to hear it but it would still be creepy and somewhat offensive because he’s dead. But that’s just me.)

AI voice and image-mimicking technology are about to become the biggest practical and ethical problem facing the radio, TV, and movie industries.

If it can be done it will be done. That’s an observation accredited to several sources including and beyond the Bible but regardless of who said it first it’s an inexorable truth and ethics has nothing to do with it.

Artificial Intelligence is a genie that can’t be stuffed back into the bottle. AI radio disc jockeys are already here. So are nonhuman voice actors.

“There are jobs that would have gone to voice actors that are now going to synthetic voices.”

Tim Friedlander is president and co-founder of the National Association of Voice Actors. He told me that AI can’t yet replicate human emotion but admits some of that doesn’t matter.

“For the most part you can definitely tell the difference, an AI can’t act the same way or perform the same way that a human actor can, but in a lot of these e-learning or training videos or informational videos it’s purely a transaction of information. There’s no need for an emotional transaction. It’s just purely getting information across.”

Friedlander says he’s hearing regularly from voice actors who are losing gigs. All he can do is advocate on their behalf to protect human rights from being plowed under by new voice and image-mimicking technology.

“There are no federal laws that give you the right to your voice. So, none of us own the right to the sound of our voice. We potentially have rights over a (specific) performance we’ve given. If we’re a celebrity, we have some right of publicity that could possibly protect us in some capacity but we, as citizens in the United States don’t have the right to (own) our voices.

“That’s a thorny problem when it comes down to trying to codify it, to pass laws, especially when you’ve got a bunch of people who are passing the laws, who barely know how to use their phones.”

Tim’s undeniably right about that. But the bigger question is, after we’ve pounded on our Congressional representatives to preserve individual rights for actors, narrators, and audiobook readers will it make any difference in the long run?

Spotify already has a very good AI disc jockey who not only sounds realistic but can address you by name, play the specific music you want to hear, and relate to you personally. In its inception, it impressively mimics the voice and delivery style of real-life deejay, Xavier “X” Jernigan, Spotify’s Head of Cultural Partnerships, who previously hosted Spotify’s morning show, The Get Up.

After hearing the Spotify demo I reacted with a mind-blown “Whoa!” as if I was Kramer in Seinfeld. Now I’m wondering if I can get Robert W. Morgan and Bobby Ocean as my personalized deejays.

Like it or not, AI-generated content and voices, mimicked and newly created, are changing what we anachronistically call radio.

It’s time to get up to speed and deal with it.

Though we try to reassure ourselves that AI voice technology will never be able to match the soul and nuance of life expressed by living, trained human voices, we’re required to ask ourselves two questions: First, are we sure of that? Second, will anybody care?

Unanswerable questions aside, we still have work to do.

We must stop resisting inevitable change—not because our ethical concerns are invalid, but because we can’t stop the inevitable. All we can hope to do is manage the challenges and that’s a tall order.

Two bills stewing in Congress at the moment, the No AI Fraud Act and the No FAKES Act, both designed to establish voice and image rights, are good first attempts to deal with the issue but they only address AI use as far as the technology can currently be defined and used. They can’t anticipate future developments and legal loopholes. Opponents of each bill as written say they would cause more problems than they would solve.

Constitutional Law and Supreme Court expert David Coale, partner with Lynn, Pinker, Hurst, and Schegmann in Dallas, explains the legal considerations.

“I’m sympathetic but we already have two complicated bodies of tort law in this area—defamation laws where you can’t lie about someone, and fraud laws where you can’t pretend to be someone you aren’t. Beyond that, you’re well into activity protected by the First Amendment. Adding another complicated body of law on top of all that really does risk causing more problems than it solves.”

Coale is just bringing us back to reality. Lawyers will continue writing contracts, filing suits, and arguing the Constitution. Infotainment entrepreneurs and those who go by the trendy title “influencers” will ply their trades as profitably as possible. In what we still think of as radio, we will, too, as long as there’s an appetite for information and an exchange of ideas.

If we’re to meet the future we have to embrace new ways to create, disseminate, and sell content. We need to leave nostalgia in our shoebox of old pictures and forget much of the how but not the why of what we’ve learned.

Once we’re on that road we can let the marketplace guide us.

I’m not sure I want to hear Vin Scully explain the ghost runner at second going into the tenth inning. Even the best AI can only draw upon his public record to guess what he might have thought and how he would have said it. I like to think Vin hated the idea and would explain that to us with his famously clear and convincing clarity.

I knew Dr. Don Rose and my first thought about listening to him again in real-time was, as much as I miss him I don’t want to hear a genuine-sounding fake of him cracking one-liners about personal pronouns or Taylor Swift. Or, do I? He would make us laugh at the silliness of both subjects without offending anyone, and he’d stamp it with a horn honk and a giggle that perfectly hit the vocal.

We can only imagine where AI will lead us, and yet we can’t.

What would Jesus do in a given situation? We’ll soon be told and probably even hear it in his own impressively imagined and digitized voice. A lot of people will be pissed.

In radio, we need to stop hand-wringing about these things and start planning how to use it all to create a wonderfully enhanced experience for listeners and to turn a profit in the process.

“Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.” -Kahlil Gibran

A million years ago, when I was young and carefree and just starting out in the business, my goal was to own a radio station. One would have been enough, just a local-yokel operation with low overhead and a list of grateful local advertisers. We actually came reasonably close to making a deal for exactly that kind of station, but I couldn’t get the money together quickly enough.

It’s just as well. The fantasy of owning a station evolved into this reality: a) I was never going to own a station, and b) today, I wouldn’t be interested in putting any of my own money into radio. Or television. Or newspapers. I still see people posting on Facebook that they want to own a station, and good luck to those brave souls, but I’m not among them anymore.

This came to mind when it was reported by CNBC this week that Sinclair Broadcast Group is looking to sell over 30% of its television stations — that’s about 60 stations nationwide – including those in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Austin, and Fresno. Whatever the reason they’re selling, the question is who would even buy those stations? Broadcast television, like broadcast radio, is not exactly in growth mode.

When the big broadcast networks appear to be putting more eggs in the streaming basket and rumors have all of them willing to sell their broadcast licenses, that’s not a great sign for their affiliates, either.

Nevertheless, the price for Sinclair’s stations will not be cheap, and in television, it’s hard to see too many companies willing to buy unless they’re giving it all away. Who’s willing to pay more? Tegna? Apollo/Cox? Byron Allen? Who’s left to buy into broadcast TV when streaming is becoming so pervasive that the NFL is putting more and more games online?

The price will also be fairly high if Audacy sells off some or all of its assets, or Beasley, or Cumulus. And even if the price correlated to some metric of reasonable success, it would take someone with the cash in their personal account to do a deal, because Wall Street is not impressed by a business that breaks even or makes a little money. Do you think you could get a meeting with investors and convince them to back you in buying radio stations, even if the price would otherwise be right? Go ahead and try.

And if you’re looking to buy a large group, remember that private equity investors are looking for businesses they can strip-mine for saleable assets. They don’t care about the operation, they care if there’s real estate to be sold off. Ask anyone in the newspaper industry how that works out.

All of this is a shame because there are people making a go of it in all of these businesses. There are radio and television stations unburdened with debt making a tidy profit that might not get Wall Street excited but can support a staff, a news department, a promotions budget, and the light bill. Most of them have been in the same hands forever, though, and can thrive as long as the family members who inherit the facilities are interested in keeping things going. I’m not sure we have too many more generations left who would be interested in keeping an increasingly past-tense business going.

It’s like inheriting a typewriter repair shop; even if there’s enough business right now, you can see the typewriting on the wall.

So, I’m out. But for those of you still fantasizing about picking up a radio or TV station on the cheap and putting together the programming of your dreams, how realistic do you think you’re being? Do you think you could put together the money? How much debt would you be comfortable taking on? Is growth really a possibility with a broadcast station? How much would you need to see? Is it possible in 2024 to do that, or is this the radio or television version of fantasy football?

Whatever it is, I’d love to see someone give it a shot. Hey, it’s not MY money.

In January 1999, comedian Jon Stewart began hosting Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Little did he know at the time, his presentation of the news would later shape the sound of the iconic New York all-news radio station 1010 WINS.

At the time Stewart was beginning his run with the show, Ben Mevorach was ascending to his role as Director of News and Programming for the venerable Audacy-owned station. As he rose to his leadership role, he saw the way younger audiences were interacting with news content and knew that 1010 WINS would eventually need to follow suit.

In the last 25 years, the station has shifted from its hard-hitting, strictly business, stuffy presentation to a slightly lighter, sometimes more delightful conversation while still delivering the information listeners need.

“It was clear early on that he sort of changed the way folks 20 to 30-year-olds were consuming news and what it was and how they were processing information. I always thought that WINS was ahead of its time, but I had to figure out a way to understand those news consumers of doing it a different way, and how that translates to WINS,” Mevorach told Barrett News Media. “And that process really began in 1999, 2000.

“When I first became news director, if you think about it, those folks are now 35, 40, 45, 50 (years old). They’re the news consumers of today, in terms of the younger part of the demo. And I said to myself, ‘Ok, so what do they want? What will they do? How have they changed the news consumption process?’ And every decision that we have made here has kind of been with that as the backdrop.”

One of the tenets of his philosophy was understanding how, and maybe more importantly why, younger audiences were changing the news consumption habits that had been passed down to them by Baby Boomers.

“We had to understand that news has to fit into the macro behavior of people’s lives, not the other way around. forever it was, ‘You’re coming to the news. The news is where we are and you want us, so you come to us.’ That’s all changed,” Mevorach continued. “We had to learn — if we were going to evolve — how we fit into the macro behavior of our listeners. And it was clear that content alone was not the answer, and programming elements alone, that wasn’t the answer. It was finding a way to bring them together, and have them work in tandem to meet the macro behavior of our listener.”

Mevorach pointed to the recent 1010 WINS Pickleball Tournament as a case-in-point of reaching, not only younger listeners, but its audience outside of a strictly news space. He noted the average age of participants in the event was in the early 30s, just reaching into the often coveted 35-64 demographic.

“We realize that that’s something that connects the radio station — beyond the news brand, but the station itself — programming to a listener,” he said. “They connect on a programming level. It’s just one small example.”

One of the biggest changes to the station’s presentation is from its anchors, whether it be news, traffic, weather, or sports. Mevorach pointed to talents like Karen Stewart (morning traffic), Scott Stanford (morning news), and Larry Mullins (afternoon news) as key cogs into providing a lighter, but still serious when needed, approach to the legendary news brand.

“When you find people who have a strength like that … funny when it’s supposed to be funny, self-deprecating when it makes sense, but journalism with a capital J — we’ll never go away from our gold standard — but to understand that need to stop beating people up every day with hard, hurtful, painful, tragic news. It’s okay to do that kind of stuff.

“And when you find talent like that, and I’ve seen this happen before, you hire somebody with great talent and you put them in a position, and then you spend time telling them ‘Don’t do that. Well, don’t do that. That’s that’s not what we do.’ That’s not what if you hire somebody and you see their strength and you hire them for that strength, let them do what they do best,” he said.

In younger audiences, the “TikTok Effect,” or what could simply be viewed as having a shorter attention span, has actually been beneficial to the station. While some spoken word formats can spend nearly 20 minutes on one subject, the all-news format 1010 WINS uses pumps through stories like a roaring coal-powered freight train younger audiences have only seen in museums. And that short attention span also mirrors the need of New Yorkers to be presented with the information they need to know as quickly as possible.

“It reflects the city that we serve,” the 1010 WINS leader shared. “But we’ve always done that. We’ve always done those short hits to get the stories out. But what I do think has changed is the attitude in which we’re doing those stories. It’s programming versus content.

“If I’m a younger demo, and I’m always on TikTok, and it could be a classic song that fits the storyline that we’re doing, but it’s like gigantic on TikTok because those things tend to surface every once a while when all the TikTok users start to do something with that music. We will put that music, we’ll pick that song as a song that we’re choosing to tell whatever lighter story that we’re doing and suddenly like, ‘Oh, that’s my TikTok song, and I’m hearing it on my radio station.’ Those things matter.”

It would be a perfectly acceptable inclination to not mess with success, as Mevorach started in 1999. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? However, the longtime leader was unafraid to make the changes to keep the station on the top of the average New Yorker’s mind.

“Listen, I could have failed, in which case you’d be talking to someone else in programming,” Mevorach said with a chuckle. “But, honestly, there is a mantra that I have believed in for a very long time. It’s not new, it’s maybe a little cliche by now, but it’s true. Sometimes the greatest risk of all is to do nothing. That could have been WINS … if we hadn’t done this journey. Sometimes the greatest risk of all is to do nothing. You have to keep evolving or be left behind.”

The shift is obviously working. The station remains a powerhouse in the nation’s largest market. And while it maintains its journalistic integrity, a lighter side has developed at 1010 WINS that has helped position it to continue to serve an ever-changing audience.

“Our growth in the 18-34-year-old and the 25-54-year-old (demographics), has been dramatic,” Mevorach shared.

“It has fundamentally changed the sound of this radio station and the programming and the content, working together, to change the listening, more so that it’s easy to digest. And people trust us, so we can transition from the news of the day that people need and have to have with things that give them a moment for just a quick smile, a quick wit, a quick turn of phrase. I think too many people underestimate the power of that. And that, again, goes all the way back to 1999.”