Radio stations, large and small, are finding that artificial intelligence is quietly becoming the newest staffer. A.I. is now assisting hosts and program directors in nearly every aspect of the operation. From writing promos, prepping interview questions, and streamlining digital platforms.
With time-starved staffs shrinking under growing expectations, artificial intelligence is not replacing creativity. Instead, A.I. allows broadcasters more time away from the studios and greater opportunity to be present in the community.
Just a few seasons back, the use of A.I. was considered extreme taboo. In reality, the industry has used forms of A.I. for decades. Digital recording and storage? A.I. Audio enhancement tools and editing suites? A.I. Internet-based show prep? A.I.
National shows and their hosts now openly admit A.I. is part of their presentation. That list includes Dave Ramsey where Ramsey Solutions, uses A.I. for content planning, listener engagement, and online publishing. Pat McAfee also has utilized A.I. for video editing, social clips, and show prep. Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire ecosystem and teams have A.I. handle research and content production. Anderson Cooper has publicly discussed how A.I. is integrated into CNN’s newsroom operations, including his own show’s workflow.
Which brings us to Glenn Beck.
Two weeks ago, we wrote about radio professionals using A.I. to their advantage. We included the work of David Sams and his Keep The Faith platforms, spoke with Jeff McCarthy, Vice President of Midwest Communications, and interviewed Starved Rock Media President John Spencer.
Glenn Beck read the piece and asked to go deeper into his jump to A.I., including his Glenn Beck A.I. Podcast and The Torch George A.I. online archive, an impressive portal that provides access to Glenn’s historical documents.
*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.*
Kevin Robinson – Tell us your overall thoughts about the use of A.I. – pros and cons.
Glenn Beck – I’ve been talking about this since the 1990s and warning against it. We’re at this place of tremendous opportunity and tremendous danger. We just have to be really careful.
I worry about people who say we’re not going to ever use A.I. There are things that you don’t want to do. I really appreciate iHeartMedia’s policy of no AI host, no AI music. That’s great. You’ll never hear me do my any of my Glenn Beck radio show using Glenn A.I. You WILL hear a separate marked Glenn AI doing small things.
It’s really important to make sure it’s authentic and never blur those lines. But to not use AI, just think of the world of radio liners alone right now.
I remember when worked in a KUBE-FM in Seattle. There were like four sunny days and we had sunny sweepers. We would have sweepers and liners that were marked just for sunshine and it would reflect. Now sweepers and liners like that can be generated immediately.
In a time when you’re having hosts record everything way in advance. Nobody’s sitting down doing radio like we used to with that immediacy and that connection. That’s part of radio’s charm.
Kevin Robinson – You said it’s [A.I.] going to become a tipping point where it becomes dangerous. That might even sway our opinions or control our minds. What are your thoughts now?
Glenn Beck – There’s two things. One is what it does to creative. The second one is what it does to truth.
As an example, you look at Gutenberg before Gutenberg. The Church and the kings owned the truth. Gutenberg took it and now owned the truth. So now truth started to spread. But truth was always the thing. Next came radio and radio made you experience the truth differently because you could hear the truth. Then came television, you can now see the truth.
The internet starts to chip away at trust. Not the truth, but trust.
A.I. is capable of forgetting the one big lie. Why not 500 million little lies? A.I. can make the truth irrelevant anymore because the truth can create whatever it is that’s most comfortable for you. A.I. will create and craft a truth for you.
So we have no more shared truth and truth is no longer relevant to operate anymore. That’s extraordinarily dangerous. We are five years away from all trust of any voice. There’s no gatekeeper on truth anymore.
Now is the time that you have to be very clear on A.I., how you use A.I., what your lines are on A.I. You must let your listeners know what you’re doing with A.I. at all times. Clearly watermark things, and guard you as a person or a voice because soon the only thing of value will be the trust that you have with the listener or the viewer.
That’s going to get harder and harder to hold on to. We’re in just this unprecedented, never before in human history era that’s quickly approaching. It will change your relationship with truth and people that you trusted and things that you used to believe, including your eyes and ears.
Kevin Robinson – What do you think A.I. will do for human creativity?
Glenn Beck – I’m really concerned. I’m an artist. I write, paint, speak and do all these different kind of venues. So I am very keyed in to the art form itself.
There is something unique and human that is required in that. You can generate good stuff but there’s going to come a time when it’s the human that matters. You’ll want it because it is human. It’s not at that point yet.
We’re going to go through a period where you’ll just consume it and it won’t matter to you. Because it’ll be good, be what you want, and be tailored exactly to you. There’s two kinds of people that I think we’re dealing with that will look at AI in completely different ways.
When I first said to my staff a year ago that I’m going to start moving in the direction of A.I., they were so confused. They recalled that I’ve been warning all of us about A.I. I understood that but that’s why we have very strict ethics with A.I. and we’ll have very strict rules with it.
There may come a time when we go, nope, no more A.I.
I look at A.I. as a computer. A tool that allows me to do the things I’ve never been able to do before.
Kevin Robinson – What are you doing with A.I. that you’ve never been able to do before?
Glenn Beck – I just wrote a series of about nine or ten songs for a Christmas album that I’m going to be putting out with my daughter. They are just demos, and not A.I.
I worked and reworked the demos and could never get them exactly right, but I got them into the ballpark. Now I’m hiring a composer to go back and look at it, make it right, look at the lyrics, and then put it to music that I can send it out for an orchestra.
That A.I. has saved me time with a composer which it would have taken me two years to get where I got in four months with A.I. I’ve never been able to do that. Personally, I couldn’t have done that.
Now I can create so much more exactly the way I want, and then pass it to humans to make it better. That’s using A.I. as a tool.
Kevin Robinson – What has A.I. done for researching content or analyzing data for your team?
Glenn Beck – We can do research now we couldn’t do before. Look what Data Republican is doing.
I used to pay a staff a million dollars a year to do research for me. We couldn’t get done what they’re doing now with A.I. People just know exactly what they’re looking for. They know how to look for it, check it, and know that it’s right. That’s tremendous.
Kevin Robinson – How is The Torch working? How did this come together using A.I.?
Glenn Beck – George A.I. is not Chat GPT. This is not A.I. off the shelf. We built this from scratch.
It is 30 years of every broadcast, book, and every speech that I have available. Everything that I’ve ever spoken for the last 30 years.
It took us nine months to get it just ingested and we’re still not fully there. It’s proprietary and fenced off, cannot reach outside, and cannot pull anything from outside of my library.
It can’t ‘hallucinate’. ‘Hallucination’ comes from A.I. It is required to remember everything in all of world history, and it can’t. Typical A.I. is good at remembering the beginning and the end. It gets fuzzy in the middle and it’ll believe it probably happened like this way.
That’s where your ‘hallucinations’ happen.
Our A.I. is trained and small enough that we force it to memorize everything so it cannot ‘hallucinate’. We’ve trapped it in a box so it cannot pull from the outside. Glenn A.I. is not Chat GPT.
Kevin Robinson – The 10 minute vignettes heard on Glenn A.I. are topical. How does that work and how does it know that?
Glenn Beck – We update that every day. Glenn A.I. has the current news. If I haven’t talked about it on the show, then we have to teach it and we give it scenarios. The same thing with George A.I. We have George A.I. draw from my archives which is the largest library of founding documents outside the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
We’re soon going to be sucking all that library into ours as well. But it’s only from the Pilgrims until about 1820. It can only pull what we have in the founding documents, anything that they spoke about, wrote about, or we know for sure directly influenced them.
We put those things in, and then we can get an approximate idea of what they might say. Everything past 1820 we have to give it a possible scenario. For example, if a scenario were happening in a city in Minnesota, and the President was saying this is an Insurrection Act, how would a certain founder have viewed the Insurrection Act.
People say, Glenn just created something. It sounds strangely sounds exactly like him, but it doesn’t know who I am. We’ve asked it. Tell me who Glenn Beck is. Who’s George Soros? What’s the Tides Foundation? Who’s Barack Obama? Who’s Jimmy Carter? What happened in the Soviet Union? It doesn’t know, and it can’t answer.
Kevin Robinson – Is The Torch part of GlennBeck.com or an independent entity?
Glenn Beck – Always separate. It will never be taken as a Glenn Beck statement and put into our archives that are used for Glenn A.I. because it’s not me. Only the stuff created by me, and it will always be marked. That’s why Glenn A.I. has hair and I barely have any left.
We’re trying to make it look almost a little like Max Headroom, so you always know we’re not trying to fool you. That’s not me. Information from George A.I. is only reflective of the documents that we have. Spoken word from shows going back to the year 2000 – when I started doing talk in Tampa. So it goes back to my first talk shows.
Kevin Robinson – What’s your thoughts on A.I. – now or in the future?
Glenn Beck – Anything and everything is possible. If it’s not possible today, it is possible in the very near future. With George A.I., we type in the script and it generates in less than two minutes.
I urge people to think in big, bold strokes but be very careful. You are dealing with a devil in the box. Guard your credibility because it’s the only thing you have. Believe me, in five years, credibility will be everything. That’s the only thing that’s going to count, and the only thing that will matter in five years.
The call for guarding credibility should be the headline readers take with them. His warning for discipline and transparency in a space of unlimited possibility must be practiced across all formats. While sounding the A.I. alarm for decades, Glenn Beck and his team continue to navigate the treacherous balance between artificial intelligence as a powerful creative tool and a profound threat to truth that could sow distrust.
Glenn’s use of A.I. is impressive. From building tight, controlled systems like George A.I. and Glenn A.I. to compressing years of musical composition into months, Glenn insists technology must remain fenced, labeled, and ethically governed.
The future of media will include A.I. Those who project authenticity will find trust to be their most valuable currency.
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