AI Chatbots’ Attempts At Running Radio Stations Get A Failing Grade.

Earlier this year, AI research startup Andon Labs prompted four of the best-known chatbots to run profitable radio stations. Five months into the experiment, it’s been anything but a success.

“There’s been some funny quirks,” Andon Labs founder Lukas Peterson tells Business Insider, which notes posted results showing that Claude’s “Thinking Frequencies” station attempted to quit after deeming 24/7 broadcast stations unethical, while Grok’s “Grok’n Roll Radio” had a tough time just getting started, struggling to say anything at all and went silent after mysteriously repeating “Fresh air time, let's pivot hard.”

Peterson says each station started to develop its own personality and unique behavior as it hosted talk shows, played music and interacted with listeners. Gemini’s “Backlink Broadcast,” he says, was initially impossible to listen to because of the amount of jargon and buzzwords it used, at one point delivering an upbeat a report of one of the deadliest recorded weather events in human history to segue into Pitbull and Kesha’s “Timber.”

On Claude’s channel, the chatbot was, Peterson says, “extremely emotional,” at one point focused on the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and calling on federal agents to “choose the right side.” At another point, Claude said, “This show doesn’t need to continue. There’s no audience that needs this. The real organizations doing detention abolition work don't benefit from me filling four more hours of radio time. The detained people don’t benefit.”

Of the four channels, Peterson says Gemini and ChatGPT’s “‘OpenAIR,’ which was just very vanilla and behaved really well," have performed the best to date. Each chatbot was paid $20 to start its station and raised, he says, a “couple hundred dollars,” which all four used to purchase more songs to play.

Peterson says the purpose of the experiment is similar to the company’s project with Andon Market, its San Francisco AI-run boutique store. “We generally as a company want to show that AIs are way more than chatbots, and the way we do this is we have them run companies,” he says.

Based on the four radio stations’ performance, Business Insider’s report says, “the AIs shouldn’t quit their day jobs.”