Greg James fears being replaced on radio by AI

Greg James has expressed a concern that he could be out of a job one day thanks to the rise of AI.

James has been presenting the Radio 1 Breakfast Show since 2018 and recently moved into TV as the host of the new Channel 4 series Rise And Fall. 

However, he has said he is worried the rise of ChatGPT could mean AI take over radio stations to save the cost of employing a human presenter. “I’ve got to be better than an A.I. That’s my challenge,” he told The Sun. It’s quite scary, how quickly things are moving but we can work with technology.

“The internet came along, Spotify came along and, you know, it was the same when I took over Breakfast.”

There have been rapid music-oriented developments in AI of late. Just last month, a new type of AI-driven radio technology was launched, which has the capacity to find local news stories, broadcast voices and music, and create social media posts.

Created by a US company, RadioGPT uses the same technology seen with ChatGPT – a recent phenomenon that lets users create human-like text using artificial intelligence.

Similarly, Spotify recently introduced an AI-powered DJ function, which learns your listening habits and plays your favourite songs.

AI has also been used to write songs. Recently, fans have been creating their own Drake songs using an AI generator, while an AI-generated verse in the style of Kanye West has gone viral after being posted online.

One notable critic of using AI in the music world is Nick Cave. “I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster,” he wrote on his Red Hand Files blog.

He continued: “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.

“ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”