How will AI sound in the future? What are the ways to lead a story using AI? These were the questions asked in this Monday afternoon session. Anna Vošalíková, a Chief Producer at Czech Radio has two experimental series called Digital Writer behind her. She introduced their processes, how her team worked to make up stories with AI, from the first season, which was somewhat quirky, she now plans to make an elaborate third season.
At the start, her team instructed AI to write short stories in the most common genres like romance, crime or horror and then let actors record the results. Vošalíková’s team was not really satisfied with the outcome. Therefore in the second season they turned towards collaboration with renowned Czech writers who worked within different levels of AI co-operation. Some were only inspired with the prompts from the system, one of the writers had even a session with AI and they discussed the story together. The authorship rests mainly with the human author, as Vošalíková later answered one of the questions from the audience.
Technical development specialist from Finland, Satu Keto, introduced a vast array of experiments which she has undertaken in the last years. On the way toward understanding AI and its benefits her team within the Yle station tested eg. text-to-speech storytelling technology. In 2022 they tried to recreate an actual radio host with great results. She sees the main challenges being how to build trust in artificially presented content. Satu Keto and her team see the biggest need in personalization/personal service development, participatory narrative forms and working with different AI tools.
