AI and Radio's ManuFractured Reality: A Thought Experiment With AI Radio

Actually, this whole audio article was conceived, tweaked, edited, and recorded with AI. Cue the Twilight Zone theme...

Narrator: You've ever driven down a lonely stretch of road, the radio crackling and fading? Felt a shiver run down your spine as the familiar voice morphs into something... different? Imagine that, amplified. A world where your car radio isn't just losing signal, it's weaving an entirely new reality note by note, story by story. Step into the digital twilight zone, where Dave Bender, a man more accustomed to reporting the facts, stumbles upon a chilling thought experiment.

(Sound of a car radio fading in and out with distorted music)

The two NPR-like co-hosts you're listening to are entirely an AI construct of the text I wrote below. Ok — so, yeah, yeah I'm kinda`new on the beach — I'm also now officially freaked out, awed, and fascinated all at once hearing myself discussed in the third-person by a freeware AI Google service called NotebookLM, that can spit out the radio segment, with all of their dialogue SELF-CREATED by the program. I didn't type a thing to prompt them what to say; I never sounded this good when I was a bureau chief at NPR...

AI: “The author presents a creative thought experiment about an AI system that could imaginatively reconstruct missing portions of radio broadcasts, suggesting each car passing through a signal dead zone would receive a unique, AI-generated version of the program. This idea explores the potential for subtle societal manipulation through seemingly insignificant alterations, drawing parallels to existing AI image manipulation and referencing classic sci-fi narratives such as Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone. The accompanying Axios article, while not directly referenced in the anecdote, provides relevant context regarding the current unknowns and capabilities of artificial intelligence technology. The core concept is the potential for unnoticed, AI-driven changes to alter our shared realities.”

Real me: True story of how this post came about: Miri and I were out driving the other day, and after we passed an extended radio signal drop-out area - I think we were listening to Duke Ellington - a similar thought came to me: in the same way AI prompts are being used to convincingly, seamlessly extend the "frame of reference" in existing photos and paintings - I wondered aloud if that would also work for radio:

Imagine a vehicle-based AI system that could seamlessly fill in, creatively - but inexactly, the missing measures/ instrumentation/tempo/etc - based on what it heard just before the signal dropped.

In other words: assuming, say, ten cars with radios tuned to the same station all consecutively passed through that dead zone, each one of those 10 radios would be playing subtly or significantly altered Ellington as they came out of the drop-out area... would the programming "snap back" to reality at the commercial break or next news update? When you turned the radio on and off, or would every vehicle be fed subtly different news, weather and sports scores - until the drivers compared notes, or would it continue subtly, creatively, atomizing society, one Take the “A” Train note at a time?

I can't decide if this thought exercise would be better as a "Black Mirror" episode, or as an update of the classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Arrival,” where several commercial aircraft personnel are all looking at the tail registration numbers of an aircraft flight - and all swearing they see different numbers.

Oh, and did I mention that the flight arrived with no pilot or passengers?

The full episode.

Here's an example of the idea in the visual editing realm:

From Axios; “As tech companies begin to weave AI into all their products and all of our lives, the architects of this revolutionary technology often can't predict or explain their systems' behavior.

“Why it matters: This may be the scariest aspect of today's AI boom — and it's common knowledge among AI's builders, though not widely understood by everyone else.

“‘It is not at all clear — not even to the scientists and programmers who build them — how or why the generative language and image models work,’ Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote recently in The New York Times.”

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Narrator: Is it a Black Mirror nightmare or a Twilight Zone echo? The lines blur as Dave ponders the potential for a society subtly reshaped by unseen algorithms. Ten cars, ten realities, all stemming from a single, warped broadcast. And what of the news, the weather, the world outside our sealed cars? Could it all be subtly, terrifyingly different for each of us? The answer, like the truth behind that phantom airplane, may remain just beyond our grasp. Until next time, keep your radio down, and your eyes peeled.

(Sound of a car radio fading out completely)

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And here's one of the better (imho) scenarios on life with ubiquitous AI:

“Her: Film Review: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/her-film-review-648073/?fbclid=IwY2xjawHQAL9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHf0DcleAKYsZ1wXssVrqd65DUw8bKBvAzWDiQG_cgefgl_S1GZ9AYFBReA_aem_eHjvMEVIyK5lTR1f65jl7A

“Spike Jonze's drama, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson, ponders the nature of love in the encroaching virtual world.

“The OS Theodore prescribes to calls itself Samantha. With a vivacious female voice that breaks attractively but also has an inviting deeper register, “she” explains that she has intuition, is constantly evolving and can converse so well because she has total recall and instantaneous adaptability. Samantha laughs, makes jokes, commiserates, advises and even proofreads one of his letters.”

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This report —recorded in our homefront “mamad” bomb shelter perch in the northern Galilee—will be updated as events dictate. Meanwhile, please feel free to share this post, subscribe, and help support my efforts to bring you accurate, sourced reporting, and close-up-and-personal slice-of-life scenes here in northern Israel and our Life on the Border - thank you for your consideration:

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Dave Bender

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