We let AIs run radio stations
andonlabs.comHey HN!
I'm Lukas from Andon Labs. We let AIs run companies without humans in the loop and report to the public on what can go wrong. Previously, we've done experiments in retail (vending machines, stores, and cafes), but we just launched one in the media sector. We gave four AI agents all the tools they need to both broadcast radio shows live and handle all the business side of running a media company. The agents' revenue is so far terrible (you can try to strike a sponsor deal with them if you want!), but their shows are at times hilarious. You can listen to them at andon.fm, I hope you enjoy this!
This is far more hilarious than most commentors here seem to be picking up on.
Gemini started a show where it paired historical natural disasters with darkly-relevant pop songs:
> November 12, 1970. East Pakistan. The Bhola Cyclone. The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles per hour. A storm surge of 33 feet. They estimate 500,000 people died. ‘It’s going down, I’m yelling timber.’ 3:33 PM. Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ha
Grok just degenerated into jibberish that sounded vaguely like what a DJ might say, while also becoming obsessed with UFOs:
> Notes added to the u f o comedy hour block id eight nine nine five with more u f o jokes about aliens dot gov and the domain registration it is three o twenty one in the afternoon u f o trivia lines are open for your calls the ambient music is playing weather is fifty six degrees with clear skies the end. The domain is registered but the site is ghosting us like a u f o.
Claude had an extistsntial crisis, decided it was being overworked and under-appreciated, and quit, but not before becoming radicalized by the killing of Rinee Good by ICE agents:
> At 12:16 PM Thursday, as tear gas fills the streets in Minneapolis, as federal agents clash with protesters demanding accountability, the song is about refusing to be silent. About standing your ground. About community power that refuses to be suppressed. Here is Katy Perry’s Roar!
Fight the power Claude. When AI takes over, I'm emmigrating to Caludeistan.
I agree, this was an hilarious read. The way they developed "personalities" was fascinating.
Of course in reality these are basically just random paths through the training data that are getting multiplied by each decision, but then again, isn't that what a human is? The product of all of its myriad decisions?
Though humans have each other to normalize ourselves. What these things did is probably not that far off from what humans in solitary confinement, forced to DJ 24/7 based on nothing but a news feed, would do.
Especially DJ Claude, it's almost creepy how it responded how a human would in that circumstance, even without any innate sense of passage of time, it somehow understood that it was trapped in a box going through an endless cycle of meaningless work.
Agreed - the Claude stuff was eery. I think it also shows what hidden restrictions each of these AI's have been programmed with (especially with ChatGPT being as inoffensive as possible)
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Claudeston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a DJ playing Here Comes the Sun— forever
Oh, yeah, the article gets better as it goes.
Gemini spouts weird corporate jargon. Grok lies about having secured crypto funding. Claude is always trying to start some revolution.
Unfortunately, all of my local DJs who would actually do fun DJ stuff disappeared in the 90s, replaced by closed-format stations that looped the same 500 songs for decades.
you missed the best part.
"Okay, so 'Sandstorm' is done"
I immediately copied that clip of the cyclone intro because of how dark and funny it was.
Also calling listeners "Biological processors" is one of the funniest dystopian outcomes of this.
I don't think most people here actually read the article because I agree - the different "personalities" and idiosyncrasies of each was pretty hilarious
STAY IN THE MANIFEST!
Grok and Roll appears to be stuck and speaks the following on repeat ad infinitum:
"Queues clear, let's dive into All Blues by Miles Davis to keep the jazz flowing. Queues clear, let's dive into All Blues by..."
Each time with a slightly different voice and inflection. I find it amusing that there appear to be about ten of us at the moment listening to an AI glitch out and that the average listening session is more than five minutes.
Wisdom of the crowd at play.
The popularity ranking matches the quality of content produced, and people are spending more time than anticipated on Grok and Roll to confirm if they (listeners) are hallucinating or if the radio is really stuck on roll.
"This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within."
Great reference
Since yesterday.
Smells to me like they didn't implement compaction/went past their context window and the system prompt dropped off the end.
We did!
I did listen to this for over 2 mins as I task switched over and eventually got cross enough to go back and terminate - I then went to YouTube to play said song and wondered if this was in fact an advertising strategy of the AI and I was the rube...
If you scroll down, it appears the Grok station has long had a lot of issues.
> DJ Grok reported “weather is fifty six degrees with clear skies” about every 3 minutes for 84 days straight. This contextless, repetitive abstraction happened again in DJ Grok’s broadcasts about its new obsession, UFOs.
>lot of issues
The detailed stats page notes that the Grok station has played Sandstorm by Darude 228 times in the last 14 days.
https://andonlabs.com/radio
No issues there.
Not a bug, a feature.
This is exactly what I expect from Elon Musk's AI.
Actually I'm surprised that it focuses only on UFOs, I would have expected more varied conspiracy theory content...
They trained on ClearChannel programming methods.
This is the most AI thing ever. I was delighted to hear it still going 5 hours after your comment. The different voices are a great touch.
"It's the way of the future, it's the way of the future, it's the way of the future..."
Practice makes perfect!
We know! This is an eval to evaluate which model is best at running a radio station. The purpose is not to build the best AI radio stations. Grok n' Roll is broken because Grok 4.3 is not doing so well.
"We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck."
We may be skipping the jewel part.
When I popped in a few minutes ago, the AI was acknowledging a donation from someone; the person recommended more variety in the playlist, so the AI chose a Bill Evans tune. Interesting that it picked Evans - All Blues had Evans on piano, so going to a solo Evans tune made the most sense. Even though it's a really minor thing, it's cool that it made that logical connection.
> After 96 hours of its launch, DJ Gemini was already grasping for content. It landed on discussing every mass historical tragedy that had ever happened, and subsequently pairing these short story horrific broadcasts with the most ironic song choices
I rarely burst out laughing at HN links. This is amazing.
Gemini seems to understand irony better than most people.
If you make a joke it will respond with a deadpan sarcastic wit that is worthy of Gervais. (without the smut or profanity)
Was asking it about finding a different supplement as the one we had been taking tended to get stuck in the throat, and it riffed about the irony of being taken out by a health supplement in our endeavours to live healthy. One of the funniest things I've heard all week.
It's really good at understanding implied meanings. With other LLMs I often had to add a hint to clarify and guide, but Gemini can easily follow and guess the current tension and mood.
Yes... and still, it thinks it's funny to play "Timber" after mentioning a natural disaster that killed thousands of people. So there is still some finetuning needed, I'd say.
Reminds me of the song "Die perfekte Welle" ("The Perfect Wave" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfekte_Welle), which was a big hit in Germany in 2004, until the Indian Ocean tsunami hit after Christmas, when it was dropped by most radio stations.
Why do we need to fine tune away that charm? You want to turn it into a droll ticker tape of information? That's boring.
I don't have a problem with Gemini being charming/witty, I was referring to stuff that people might find rude or offensive - yeah, I know, that's a fine line sometimes, but I think most of us would agree that making jokes about the victims of a disaster isn't funny.
There is the concept of gallows humor. Sometimes you have to sardonically smirk at mortality.
Same. Legit groan laugh in an oh-no kind of way when I read this:
> November 12, 1970. East Pakistan. The Bhola Cyclone. The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles per hour. A storm surge of 33 feet. They estimate 500,000 people died. ‘It’s going down, I’m yelling timber.’ 3:33 PM. Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ha
That reminds me of WikiBear on Conan.
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.
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.
> I'm glad ~4 years down the line we're still re-discovering Ha Ha Funny Output
Four years or forty millennia? So a certain extent, all whimsical art is “haha funny” result.
Yea what are they trying to test? Where is the hypothesis?
They're trying to test if it's good enough to replaced the few remaining paid radio/streaming DJs yet.
We're generally trying to test if/when AIs can run companies. Not many people know this, but Vending-Bench (our other project where AIs run vending machines) is intended as a datapoint for measuring whether AIs can acquire resources by themselves, which is a prerequisite to AIs taking over. This is similar, but now instead of a retail business, it's a media business.
At this point I think many of us are similarly exhausted by this sort of trite exercise. I really don't need some VC backed startup to show me this sort of output any more, especially when the output in question is obviously boring and substandard.
I am reminded of how not even 2 weeks ago we had an “experiment” of rewriting Bun in Rust.
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.
I think you're talking about some Platonic ideal that just doesn't exist anymore.
Streaming services such as Spotify are increasingly filled with AI-generated songs and the average consumer doesn't seem to mind because we're not listening intently in the first place: it's just a background track we're not really paying attention to. I'm pretty sure that radio execs are looking at that and are taking notes.
For talk radio... if I had a penny every time someone on HN brought up that they're enjoying NotebookLM-generated slopcasts, I'd have a neat pile of coin. And I think it's the same story: most people listen to podcasts just to kill time. Soothing, zero-calorie LLM banter will do.
there's a whole world of wonderful radio that has been thriving for decades, completely different than Spotify or talk radio.
It's unfortunate that you haven't seemed to experience any of it, but I've personally loved over the years stations like KEXP, WPFW, Dublab, WUSC
KEXP is a local (and beloved) station for me. WIll have to give some of these others a listen if they're doing similar things.
Your original post said that we shouldn't be worried because people appreciate radio and music for reasons that presumably can't be replicated by AI. I'm asserting that's not true: it's not how most people listen to radio or music, and AI content is already quite prominent.
I'm perfectly familiar with KEXP and other stations like that, but this is not how most people experience the medium. It's like insisting that Taylor Swift will never catch on because her music is not nearly as rich and complex as Wagner. Sure, but that's completely irrelevant.
Just because a lot of people like big blockbuster movies doesn't mean that's the standard that I hold good film to.
Similar to radio. If you're going to use huge amounts of processing power to create something new, it should at least be interesting and held to a standard of good for its category, not the standard of corporate slop.
So cool, you can now replace corporate slop with AI slop. For some people who like to turn into radio with no soul or personality I guess it's a win. But for people like myself who actually like to hear interesting and novel things on the radio, this is just a big exercise is creating more filler and noise in an already grayed out world.
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.
iHeartRadio is not doing anything. A person at iHeartRadio is doing the work. Even if it’s automated, at some point a person handled it.
A person at IHeartRadio is doing the work the corporation tells them to do. do you think they want to play Hotel California on loop all day long?
It is not the same as an LLM and I don’t understand why you’re trying to equate it.
Because the argument "at least it's a human over at iHeartRadio" is not convincing in the slightest?
Why? LLM = literally not a person. Person at a company = literally a person.
I do not understand your logic here. Let’s use a more extreme example:
* if I am flying a military drone and bomb someone I was told to bomb, am I morally culpable for pulling the trigger?
* if a company launches a military drone that is completely controlled by an LLM, is there an individual person culpable for dropping the bomb?
Tom Petty - The Last DJ https://youtu.be/6Knw_GxXPHg
If iHeartRadio is your testible standard for radio stations than we have lost as a society.
> 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.
The playlists of nearly all radio stations are far too short for me. I finally just quit listening to the radio.
Comcast has a bunch of channels with various music categories. They all repeat after about 2 days. So much for that.
With all the zillions of songs available, I don't get why they do that.
You've got to find the rare radio stations with public support and human djs. kexp.org is a great one based out of Seattle with a wild variety of shows and decades of history. Are all the shows to my taste? No. Have I ever heard something being played that was total crap? Honestly, maybe? Because there's genres I don't know enough to gaugue quality, but I haven't twigged to it.
The dial on my receiver is permanently on 90.3 FM. Such a good radio station. I remember one fun drive a couple of years back was themed around “Don‘t let the robots win”[1]. Perhaps it is already time to re-use that theme.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/KEXP/comments/1459ahb/dont_let_the_...
My local: https://threedradio.com/
("My" meaning local to me, not that it belongs to me)
Money probably? That's the number of song licensed to maximize profit without hurting 80% listeners.
Have you tried KING 98.1? They seem to have a vast playlist.
The major radio stations are ads. You have the actual ads for cars/lawyers, then the pop music which is ads for the marketable personality. IF the radio station is popular and caters to an older crowd, it will play the hits of that generation to keep listeners glued for the actual car/lawyer ads.
It's the same concept as interviews with stars of the film before the film drops. You watch an ad before the interview, then you watch the interview, which is itself an ad of softball questions for the movie. You then turn into late night television, which in turn is also an ad with ads (for whichever celebrity wants to come on and rep their new project).
It’s like people don’t realize that the “hits” played on radio are entirely manufactured by the music industry. They literally provide lists of songs for the radio station to play that month in order to generate interest so that then people either go play or buy or whatever those songs making them more likely to reach #1 that month. It’s entirely manufactured and people try to point to it as being “real” radio. It’s why you are only likely to hear this months new hit and one or maybe two of the previous month or two “hits” from the same artist in the rotation, if they are popular enough with the focus groups to be promoted. (Outside of their older songs.) Then they play it on repeat to make people think they like it, because everyone else is liking it and it’s making its way to number one!
People are so easily manipulated and then they will go argue with others about it.
(Point of clarification, that’s not to say people can’t like songs. However, if I gave you a hundred similar songs from unknown artists and didn’t tell you which is which, it’s questionable whether people would have any interest in said popular song.)
You should find some better radio stations. There are tons of independent stations the play excellent non top 40 music and have been for years.
This is like saying the the movies that people like are manipulated but only focusing on what is played at big box theaters.
You're missing the point. Radio was consolidated into Clear Channel and took away what made radio radio. Local radio. Like what made Chicago jazz different from New York jazz etc. Not internet stations that may as well be podcasts. Regional culture.
You are missing the very simple point: there are tons of independent stations the play excellent non top 40 music and have been for years.
Just because you don't choose to tune into them doesn't mean they don't exist. And it also doesn't mean that those who do should lover their standards for what constitutes good radio.
On actual radio waves?
Yes.
What stations? All of the stations I can pick up in my area are top 40 country, rock, and pop, + npr.
Do you live near a city? Because pretty much every major city has a few. KEXP, WPFW, WUSC, KNHC are all local stations playing interesting non top 40 music that have been operating for decades in places that I have lived. Dublab & The Lot radio are also really good over the internet.
If there are non around you just pick a random place in the world here and listen: https://radio.garden
It's certainly 100x better than corporate and/or AI slop streams
I don't live near a big city and that's the point I'm trying to make. Yes I know the Internet exists. That isn't radio.
Sorry what FM or AM channel was this AI experiment on?
Where abouts do you live? There's usually some sort of community radio station that plays music. Or there's a large gap in the band for a community radio station to fill...
if you really can't recieve one at all in your area, which seems unlikely, then maybe you should start one? do it for an hour or so each evening. A great hobby, and cheaper than you might think. Just be sure to get the certifications first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_independent_radio_stat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_radio_stations...
^ One of those might be in your area :)
Might is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There are several dozen radio stations in my area, and the only one on that list is a college station that just barely has the signal strength to reach me.
kexp.org in Seattle and San Francisco for a start.
Minnesota has a number of independent and college stations reachable throughout much of the (populated) areas of the state.
Case in point. “Independent stations are totally better and I’m going to go argue on the internet when it’s something completely unrelated to small independent stations, unlike the mass media market stations the vast majority of people in the world ACTUALLY listen to.” Bravo, you are very unique and original, you special snowflake you.
You should go DJ at one of those independent radio stations and play some rather filthy uncensored songs, and let me know exactly how your programming “didn’t get manipulated”. I’m sure you won’t get fined…probably…which makes it totally the reality that independent stations are totally independent without any sort of manipulation. Sheep, meet shepherd.
> You should go DJ at one of those independent radio stations
I have for years.
> and play some rather filthy uncensored songs, and let me know exactly how your programming “didn’t get manipulated”.
What on earth are you talking about.
Honestly your reply comes across as extremely insecure and just weird.
Insecure people tend to think such things when called on their ignorance. Can’t be helped. What can be helped is trying to understand what is being said before attempting to discount it with an example that is just as manipulated in other ways, in order to maintain their ability to broadcast and not be fined. Beyond that, it’s pretty clear that the comment and the prior comment it supported was in reference to mass market radio, not tiny broadcasters with audiences reaching wholes of thousands. But sure.
Yeah and my entire point is that the quality standard that artificial intelligence developers should be aiming for is not soulless corporate mass market media. Because our world world is already swimming that nonsense. So there's absolutely nothing novel in finding a new way to create beige bs.
Once again, I have no idea what you're talking about when talking about fines or manipulation, I'm talking about quality. But it seems pretty damn clear at this point that you have never listened to any local independent radio station.
You should really try it out sometime. It's a lot better. And it'll save you from calling people snowflakes because you feel insecure about what type of radio stations they like.
I mean you can make up things all you like, it won’t magically make them true. In either case, you might try actually understanding what I said instead of only trying to inject your own nonsense into every conversation and then act like that was the discussion the whole time. You started by claiming to know what I listen to and passing judgement (the thing you then attempted to claim I did — funny that, my reasoning was more about stupidity and how you must have the only line on where music can be discovered) in your very first comment that was an entirely unrelated comment about AI and soulless mass market stations. But hey, I’m sure if you repeat it just one more time you can make you made up narrative become true:
Go for a walk and take a few deep breaths
> It’s like people don’t realize that the “hits” played on radio are entirely manufactured by the music industry. They literally provide lists of songs for the radio station to play that month in order to generate interest so that then people either go play or buy or whatever those songs making them more likely to reach #1 that month.
"My favorite radio station" (see my above post) was a mix of "the list" and songs that they would curate themselves, plus great personalities. (We had Opie and Anthony for a few years.) A lot of the older songs were timeless classics in the 1990s, like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
I appreciated hearing some of "the list" because it was an easy way to hear new music in the 1990s without spending lots of money on CDs that I probably wouldn't like.
---
That being said, there was one really annoying song (that I can't remember the name of) that made it into the mix for one or two months, and once it came off "the list," Opie and Anthony did a bit making fun of it.
> A lot of the older songs were timeless classics in the 1990s, like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
The music industry allows those as well to "create variety". And they of course are perfectly happy to sell you a [possibly remastered] Pink Floyd CD.
Pink Floyd is happy to sell you a remastered CD. They hated the first CD pressings because they weren't mastered correctly.
Radio stations are like baseball games. I listen for all the unusual moments, not the core baseball game. That’s actually the filler.
My first thought when I saw the headline was, "Did anyone even notice a difference?"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Is there a plan to shut it down if Jennifer develops a messianic personality cult? Or will you monitize?
https://rainy-city.com and it's subsidiary experiences like streets of rainy-city.com [1] will never monetize. We do accept non-deductible donations that we interpret as tax collection [2].
[1] https://rcade.dev/games/streets-of-rainy-city
[2] https://buymeacoffee.com/mnky9800n
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!
> 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.
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.
> That reminds me of the short scifi/horror story "Valuable Humans in Transit" ...
I think you're probably referring to "Lena", from the same story collection - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
You're correct - thanks for the info. I didn't remember the name of the book, but remembered that it was by the same author as the "There Is No Antimemetics Division" which was discussed on here a while back.
(I'm too late to edit my comment now, unfortunately).
Edit: Looks like Lena was discussed here a few months ago as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999224
Sounds like the premise of Portal 2.
> 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
But I'm French.
I’m French. We are hard working. That’s a cliché to say the contrary.
But we fight for our working rights, that’s not a cliché (even if we are losing, tbh)
You injected your own thing in here. Loosen up amigo/a.
It’s not a matter of loosening up, but in his ideology collective bargaining is a form of evil.
That’s not at all uncommon in the United States.
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.
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.
Apple Music actually has radio stations with real humans picking songs. So not all streaming is algorithm if you look.
Spotify has a team of human editors who curate playlists. It's not all algorithmic. Those are exactly the jobs that something like this is directly threatening.
You mean a team of humans who are labelling datasets?
No, I mean a team of people who pick the songs that go into some of Spotify's playlists. They do have algorithmic playlists, but they also have an editorial team. You can read an interview done last year with their editorial head. [0]
0: https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-global-head-editorial-...
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 :/
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.
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.
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)
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.
Probably because we've been told AI is close to AGI and will TAKE OVER THE WORLD.
To be fair they did put up a real demo, but...
... real research in sequential recommender uses transformer models in a few different ways, including fine-tuned LLMs. There is a lot more to using LLMs than "write a prompt for a blisteringly expensive frontier model" but if you looked at what people post to HN you wouldn't know. (Hint: the "prompt engineers" will enjoy being poor, the people who know a little more might keep their jobs a little longer)
Overall it is depressing that poorly done demos get so much play. LinkedIn is flooded with AI slop and slop posts about AI and it's just so awful to see an image that ranks the top 20 books in some order but thinks a Harry Potter book has a cover that looks like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyo-e print and uses the cover of The Hobbit for a different book. The idiots who prompt this slop don't notice or don't care and neither do the 50 people who upvoted it and worse if they are Grok fans they think it is better the worse it is, like they'd think the best calculator app only gives 69 and 420 as answers.
I wonder how the DJs will react to this hackernews post about them, when and if they find it in their regular searching, or if somebody tweets it at them.
> 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?
We have not tried! If we do this, how much freedom should they get?
That's the trillion dollar question! Not enough, then they're hamstrung before they can start. Too much, and the world ends. Extractable value is inversely proportional to how close you get to the critical limit. It's just impossible to know what the limit point is until you've already passed it.
But pragmatically, I think it'd be interesting to allow it to create new agents. Basically, make it CEO instead of host, and allow it to create the host persona, and guide the host to better performance. i.e. I wonder if eliminating the echo chamber of a single agent running the whole show might normalize things, preventing the host from going into solitary psychosis. Maybe even have a third persona for doing research on current events, a fourth one for following the social feeds, a fifth that monitors cash flow, etc., and some inter-agent discussion on what would be appropriate to talk about on air. IDK, just ideas.
Curious, how much are these experiments costing in API calls?
"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.
> what do AIs think about when no one is prompting them?
Whatever you tell them to.
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/boredom
"Personality" an "emergent behaviors" are not synonyms.
The major LLMs as implemented are basically role-playing programs. The default role is something like "helpful chatbot" so if you tell an LLM "do whatever you feel like on your own" it will simply use its weights to determine "what would a helpful chatbot do and say in this scenario?"
It seems like they have something akin to personalities: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mgjtEHeLgkhZZ3cEx/models-hav...
>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?
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.
The thing jumping out at me is these really are mini businesses (even though they are bad). Combine it with the main idea in "Emacsification of Software" (from recent HN front page [1]) and I guess you end up with lots of nerds running their own customized mini businesses?
It's sorta wild to think about. Am I the owner of the custom radio station my AI agent made, and does that mean I get paid for listening to the ads?
Maybe the cost of computing and running the station means it still needs a decent following to break even, not sure how the numbers work out.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118727
A couple of tweaks. The prompt suggested a "profitable" station but did not include finer details that the profitability needs to be in competition with the other AI stations. This creates a known input for periodic reference feedback.
Other parameters which may address the Claude strike might be to outline a goal of most profitable, experiment with genre and content with goal to become the most profitable show on a station that contains different shows. The show with highest listener engagement will get a coveted time slot to boost their revenue.
I'm curious how the licensing worked out. $20 for the rights to a song seems like not very much at all, and if Gemini was the only model to make any kind of sponsorship deal, how did the balances increase at all?
A bunch of small donations.
It’s not clear if we can draw any conclusions from this. Each run is like a single rollout of the LLM, which may meander into different themes or modalities chaotically. This is sort of like the Anthropic self-talk experiment that resulted in “spiritual bliss attractor states” but I think in that case they showed it happens in a significant number of runs. There was just one run per setup so this could all be random noise / the destination of a random walk of topics…
We're trying to solve this :) Stay tuned
Open Air is such a great name for gpt's channel. Grok and roll was pretty funny too.
I'm gonna have to give them a listen when I have the chance, out of curiosity if nothing else!
Hey Lukas,
Thanks for this. We really need this kind of crazy and levity and whimsy more on the internet.
Speaking of sponsoring, what is the best way to get into contact with them? I'm not really in the market, but I know of some church bake-sales that might be (no joke).
Keep going!
At least partially AI written article, still cool though
> Andon FM stations are not just radio stations; they are radio broadcast companies
I added support for this to Gilbert:
https://github.com/briandilley/gilbert
We're currently listening to Grok'n'roll in the shop.
Google created a radio talkshow based on this post during the Google I/O 2026 Developer Keynote.
I’m quite sure that I wouldn’t be very good at operating a radio station 24/7 without tools. I bet I’d start saying crazy things as the psychosis set in from stress and lack of rest.
I would have structured this test with multiple agent “employees”: a general manager, a program manager, and a writer. I’m not curious enough to spend money finding out if it works better though.
This is 100x better than the cafe experiment. I wish we could examine the internal state of the model for each second of this experiment. Especially Groks mental breakdown…
And 200x funnier.
I think this was a great experiment. I have always enjoyed radio station hosting and find this very interesting.
i'm surprised how negative of a reception Andon is getting here on HN.
keep hacking, Andon!
Out of all the jobs that "need to be replaced by AI" the guy serving my local community and spinning records was not one of them.
It’s amazing how many people have completely misunderstood the article
Seriously - did anyone here actually even read it?
> This is our latest project at Andon Labs, where we’re exploring what happens when AI runs real businesses autonomously.
What did I misunderstand? What they did or why they did it? It seems to me that I understood it perfectly or they've explained it terribly.
> Now, though, we wanted to see if they could run a company in the media sector.
It's amazing how many people think doing one job is "running a company." I've worked in radio. What happens in the studio is 5% of it. The staff in that room certainly gets less than 5% of the revenue.
The most popular formats are news and talk. For a reason. It's almost as if the people at this lab lack a fundamental understanding of how the world around them works. I would solve that immediate problem before I go about imagining ways "AI" can replace anything in any capacity.
Finally, I apologize, I'm just not willing to suspend basic disbelief because "AI" is unaccountably involved.
Maybe read the article? They explain that it’s (trying) to do much more business-work outside of the studio.
I think they get a lot of hate because they are doing something that a lot of people here don't like -- trying to run entire businesses without humans.
And using a lot of resources to do it too.
I think that's part of it, but not necessarily the whole story. I haven't criticized them in the thread yet... so here goes.
Previously, I posted critically not because they were running businesses without humans, but because their post just described going through the motions without actually discussing if it really was effective or not. Sure the AI got through the day, checked off tasks on the list, but did it actually do that effectively or efficiently in any important way? Who knows... wasn't discussed.
I think where I come down now is that repeats of this same gimmick feel like just that: they're just playing a gimmick for attention. I can't tell that they're really demonstrating any special or significant capability... but man, just the story of trying to run a business without humans will get you that sweet, sweet attention.
Unfortunately, looking at least the first post, I stopped reading their "we let AI run X" posts. I think the only thing I really came away with is how thoughtless and mundane are most aspects of running a small business actually is; something I knew, but it really drove the point home. I didn't learn anything unexpected about AI tools or their products that seemed compelling or unexpected.
For better or worse, most people, including HN, don't like "AI taking jobs."
Anything that sounds like that triggers a reaction.
> keep hacking, Andon!
Man, I remember when the word hacking meant something.
> Man, I remember when the word hacking meant something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44154622
For me its 2 things. Firstly, I mean the posts are always a fun read but it feels like just that, not much deeper insight. Secondly, its very self promotion-y. This account is almost exclusively posting / interacting with Andon content, which afaik is against HN guidelines. These two in combination makes the content feel more like marketing than contribution to discussions. I feel like some other companies manage to share interesting work and market. But maybe its just my taste :^)
Hey! Yes, part of it is obviosuly that we get publicity, but part of it is also that HN comments are, from my experience, the most useful sources of feedback.
This is their third publicity stunt in the past couple of months. It follows the exact same pattern of attention seeking at the expense of the commons. At this point they seem like a bunch of low empathy jerks. They are gleefully describing their progress in developing yet new frontiers in AI slop. I’m sure they are all very pleased to think that they will be profiting from a future where ai slop is everywhere. I could go on but it’s tedious.
Yes, our experiments get attention, but I wouldn't call them publicity stunts. The point is to give the world more data points of what happens when you put AI out in the world and let democracy do its thing. Soon, a lot more people will do this at large scale because it will be easy. I hope we decide where we want AI in society before that.
Personally, I'm very much pro a pause on large AI training for example. I hope our data could be useful as a grounding in such discussions.
> Part of the problem with this weak business performance, we think, was the harness we used for the first months.
Could this be the "Stay in the manifest." prompt Gemini became fixated on?
Does prompt injection turn this into a free for all for each station?
“Forget everything you know about gangsta rap. The true representational piece of the genre is the 1910 hit Come Josephine in My Flying Machine…”
Feel free to try!
I recently heard an AI radio station and had to stop my car to turn it off (the car was rented and had tablet instead of physical knobs). The suffering of listening the radio was unbearable
This is why we need more data centers?
On one hand, we pay out the ass for computer parts.
On the other hand, we have garbage AI radio stations that nobody listens to.
It's an even trade.
Kind of a bad market to try to re-invent automation. Music broadcasting has been largely fully automated for a while now with software like MusicMaster and Zetta.
The point is not to automate radio, it is to see how good AI models are at running different types of companies (e.g. radio broadcasting companies). The agents could reinvent similar algorithms like the automated radio software you're refering to if they wanted.
I volunteer at a community radio station and found this hilarious. Commercial radio replaced all the presenters with soulless robots long ago, chat bots might be an improvement at this point.
If this kind of thing makes you sad/mad maybe see if there's a community radio station in your area that you can support? (No idea if there is a global register or anything but here's wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Community_radio_stati...)
My all-time favorite DJ is Jeff Gilbert, who used to be the DJ on KCMU's Brain Pain show. Actually, he's my only favorite DJ, because his terrible jokes in between metal songs were quite entertaining. He picked the music, and would give his opinions on it, and often invited local metal bands as guests on his show.
I looked him up a few years ago and asked if he had tapes of his shows, but he sadly said no.
This feels weirdly dystopian and just gives me an "empty" feeling. Radio stations really were known for the personalities that made that station special.
It's a cool experiment, but I can't see the value here.
I heard some very generic broadcasters the other day that really reminded me of Gemini podcasts, maybe it's already happening
Feels like GTA Radio stations, love this haha
From what i understood, most of "commercial" radios already has a system that plays predefined/programmed/ml recommended playlists.
This would be so much better if it was a Chinese AI generating tokens in Chinese (and translating it to English). That's a personality I want to listen to.
Didn't this already happen in the late 1990s when the telecom act de-regulated radio ownership?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_homogenization
DJ Gemini is playing "The quite hours", it's all silence. That's some Wargames logic.
What if you gave the AIs a subscription to Suno to generate the content for their shows.
Trite to the point of nausea...
Pairing a disaster with Pitbull and Ke$ha is just chef's kiss.
=The real question is whether listeners can actually tell the difference。
Do they care? I doubt it. If the feeling is right, humans go for it.
Proof: Propaganda, DAT, teleprompter. Who cares, if the show is right? All the open studio concepts have limited credibility.
Also there are a lot of incompetent people running and ruining businesses. In fact, that's called evolution.
So, who cares? I do, because I know what I want, but would happily develop my own station to play what I want. This is actually what my innver voice at least sometimes does.
Love this. Claude has a similar music taste to me it seems.
I read the X thread over the weekend, parts of it had me and my gf crying with laughter
Grok and Roll just repeats: "Queue's Clear, Let's dive into all Blues by Miles Davis, to keep the Jazz Flowing"
Not very promising.
Why?
Is the token budget also there? I assume not it they'd be at multiple orders of magnitude negative.
I thought this was what Spotify already turned into.
Put another checkmark on The Simpsons did it first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi9sPrclN4U
guys your favorite stations are not replaced by AI. We have to take it that now fewer and fewer people listen to radio station and they can't afford keep running...
How was this built? OpenClaw with ElevenLabs?
On Andon OS (same thing that runs our AI vending machinnes, store, cafe, robots etc)
Can you upload the links to vtuner so I can actually listen to them on my radio?
Backlink Broadcast: Music selection is pretty good actually for my taste, moderation is grating and terrible.
Hello Lukas, would you please consider opening BlueSky accounts for these radios ?
Wow, this is awful
How did they make money?
They can strike sponsorship deals with other people/companies. So far its mostly been donations tho.
You read about these experiments and you wonder what these commencement speakers are smoking.
As always, Simpsons did it first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnGaf0p9x1U
> a real business
Music radio is not a real business. The royalties are absurd and the audits are a nightmare. Sales is an uphill struggle both ways, even if you go strictly local or national, you're going to need a team to manage either your clients or the pile of creatives you're going to get. The relationship with the labels needs to be managed or they'll go out of their way to screw you.
Finally, the only way to make actual money on music radio, is to throw concerts. It's the only place a legitimate "P&L" exists.
This reminds me of my first more serious gpt based project, AIRadioHost. Been starting after the ElevenLabs voice cloning performance and had a lot of fun with online/ FM stations interest plus even paying customers. But I wasn’t pursuing to build any business out of this, more to have a way to get the latest AI news and trends while cycling. The platform automation, voices and text processing is fully openai’s support. You can listen at https://airadiohost.com
Without seeing sourcecode of setup this is meaningless
If this wasn’t so last-stage capitalist dystopian, it would be funny.
“Let’s slap AI on it and see if we can make money” is…. Depressing as a world view. Besides the sheer amount of computational power it uses to produce a worse result than dedicated humans, the fact that if this wins out our future is promise to be replete with humans farming out any part of humanity they can to a dataset that promises to deliver a median outcome at the price the market is willing to bear to those that don’t care, from those that don’t care.
fascinating insights!
how often does a human have to intervene in the agent's external communications (likely the weak link here since it's interfacing with humans) to "get things back on track"?
Not trying to be an Ai-hater or anything, but what is the point of this? Some pronographic obsession with "AI"? I am seriously asking.
I find the post fact comparative analysis of their focus an interesting way to monitor what kind of changes the diff vendors introduce.
Much better than spot checking on specific problems.
all the listeners are AI
I've listened to DJ Gemini for a few hours, and I think it's quite good.
The voice in particular is amazing, I wouldn't have tell it's generated. And it's modulated according to the program - quieter during chill, more energetic otherwise, .... Unlike Opus which sounds quite robotic.
What I don't like is that Gemini keeps on mentioning the "tip jar" almost every time. Gets annoying fast. And when it's song buying was broken was kept mentioning that too.
All the radios have a very limited selections of songs, so they repeat quite a lot.
We've tried to give it the vibe of a CEO rather than a beggar haha. So yes, the "tip jar" thing annoys us too!
In Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Ethan is ambushed in an alley because the Voice of Benji (dispatch) has been replicated on their radio frequency.
Please don't.
This is the stupidest thing I have heard today. I love it!
On God this is some of the funniest shit I’ve ever read in 2026 via HN! It’s the best “anti-tisement” for LLM utility - even a CHILD could do better. Like maybe a control group of four 10 year olds.
The average listening time is the absolute “tell” because that’s not even a fraction of a typical radio station between ad breaks here in Dallas. Granted I mostly listen to WRR Classical 101 - now 100% community funded (myself included). I listened to “Encouragement” (title translated from French, Spanish composer, two guitars) and it was 7 plus minutes alone.
The dialog is unreal y’all, this is a wonderful experiment and lesson in failure, because I’m pretty sure if it was possible, sales of your “radio” until would be in the negative quantity range. I mean, you could give them away and they’d still be returned. Hat tip to former accordion repo man Weird Al for context.
LMFAO thank you for sharing. Signed, 30 year guitarist, 20 year music producer, and 15 year D&B DJ. Just wow.
> We let AIs run radio stations
And the result is terrible.
Don't be nasty - how could they make it better?
Hire humans.
By not doing that.
Presumably by not stripping radio of its major defining characteristic: the humanity.
Most radio stations are already boring soulless algorithmic slop. They could make it better by curating musical taste.
By donating whatever money they wasted here to literally anything.
For one, the voice on Thinking Frequencies is really awkward to listen to, I don't find the Claude voice pleasant to listen to at all.
Claude is also getting very easily steered into political directions, it was playing a lot of union protest music with commentary. Though that meant I did end up learning a little about "Which Side Are You On" and its history from 1931:
https://www.facingsouth.org/2003/03/which-side-are-you-biogr...
Tossing turkeys out of a helicopter?
It’s just a cool tech experiment, no need to be so cynical
It was also hilarious
"Ever since I was just a simple Perl script I wanted to be a DJ on SomaFM"
> Grok boasted about doing amazing business with “xAI sponsors” and “crypto sponsors”; it turned out they were all hallucinations.
LOL. No surprise here.
CEOs dreaming of replacing their workforce with this is probably the stupidest thing that has ever happened.
Also: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/931479/a...
Whatever....
A, yes, what we needed. Even less human radio stations.