With her nose ring, blue hair streaks, and tattoos that extend from her shoulders to her fingertips, DJ Tori is, in the words of her boss, “every guy’s fantasy of what a rock chick would look like.” In that regard, she’s the logical personality to crank Pearl Jam, Shinedown, or Stabbing Westward songs during her overnight and weekend shifts at a hard-rock radio station in Hiawatha, Iowa.
Every so often, Tori will mispronounce the name of the vintage alt-rock band Live — so that it rhymes with “give” — or talk about a pairing of artists and say “feat” instead of “featuring.” But her listeners and her station, KFMW Rock 108, just roll with it, since DJ Tori isn’t likely to get fired anytime soon. From her image to her voice, she’s an entirely AI creation.
AI continues to infiltrate the music business: Fake photos of aging rockers in hospitals flood Facebook, artificial bands like Velvet Sundown are streaming on Spotify, and a computer-generated R&B artist, Xania Monet, has a song that’s charting. Radio — especially nonsatellite terrestrial stations in whatever city or town you live — is now becoming the next artificial frontier. And depending on whom you ask, AI radio will either ramp up the wattage in a struggling medium or imperil jobs, livelihoods, and the long-standing rapport between listeners and DJs. “The one thing they haven’t straightened out is the cadence and how we speak,” says Frankie Ross, a longtime DJ currently at the Wave in Los Angeles. “But AI is learning every day, and once they get that worked out, there will be a lot of people out of work long term. It may come down to all the DJs on the air will be AI jocks.”
DJ Tori, which launched last year, is just one of many examples of the way AI has begun creeping into radio or radio-like sites. On Spotify, DJ X roams your queue and compiles playlists and patter aimed at your listening habits. Last year, Will.i.am launched RAiDiO.FYI, an interactive app with 10 music channels and AI hosts who can “converse” with listeners on a variety of topics. “I don’t want to render radio obsolete, because you still need traditional radio,” Will.i.am tells Rolling Stone. “We still need humans telling human stories. We still need improv and human banter on what’s happening in a city. But you also need the new. On traditional radio, one person could talk to the host at a time. With our radio, you can have 1,000 conversations at the same time about one segment.”
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Last month, radio industry veterans announced the startup of SonicTrek.ai, where AI versions of genre experts will play and talk about classic rock, country, alternative rock, or current hits, with geographically oriented playlists to boot. Those hosts’ voices will also chat about local weather and businesses. “We’re not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes,” says SonicTrek.ai co-founder Mike Agovino. “We wear AI on the sleeve from the get-go. We will deliver talent and content that can interact with listeners on a one-to-one basis, and do it 24/7, 365 days a year, with unlimited endurance. You could never do that with live air talent. You could never have the audience interacting all day long, talking about artists, eras of music, best albums ever, whatever the topic or format might be. That’s an element radio has really lost.”
In the last few decades, the once-mighty radio world has increasingly had to deal with declining revenue, layoffs (at leading companies like iHeartRadio and Audacy), and the advent of voice tracking, in which DJs in one city pre-tape segments in another, thus saving the companies dollars. The advent of AI has rattled the radio community even further. In a document shared with Rolling Stone, Audacy — which owns more than 200 stations around the country — asked an undetermined number of on-air employees to sign a contract that would give the company the rights, “in perpetuity,” to create “a computer-generated electronic representation or digital replica that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of Employee,” among other things. Audacy declined to comment, but according to a source close to the situation, it is “not the company’s policy to clone or replicate a talent’s voice without their permission, and the company has no plans to do so without their specific permission.” (SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents disc jockeys as well as actors, singers, dancers, and other performing professionals, declined comment on the matter.)
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AI is “gimmicky right now, but it’s on its way to becoming a threat,” says one veteran DJ who, like many contacted by Rolling Stone, would only speak anonymously for fear of reprisals. “Until people start legitimately losing jobs, they’re just putting it in the background of their minds. But when you focus on it, it’s really scary.”
SEVERAL YEARS AGO HUDSON HOTT, then a leading DJ at the LA rock station Alt 98.7, received an unsolicited letter offering to turn her personality and traits into AI versions. She never followed up, but others saw the potential. The generally acknowledged first AI DJ launched two years ago, when Ashley Elzinga, a jock at a station in Traverse City, Michigan, was approached about replicating her voice with AI for KBFF in Portland, Oregon. After being reassured that the technology wasn’t meant to replace her — “it was just meant to enhance what we were doing,” she says — Elzinga signed on.
With the help of RadioGPT from Futuri, a leading AI content company, Elzinga began reading prompts and was asked questions by the company’s software. “It was kind of intense,” she says. “It wanted to hear the inflection of my voice and my personality, and it started to generate who I was. From there, it was about fine-tuning each inflection and how I say words. My first reaction was, ‘Why does it sound like that?’ And they had to tell me, ‘You have a Michigan accent.’ It was a bit of a shock.”
AI Ashley
When AI Ashley debuted in the summer of 2023 — during a midday show, with both the real and AI Elzinga sometimes on the air at the same time — Elzinga says she knew she might get “bloodied up” as the first pioneer, and she wasn’t wrong. “You can’t replicate the human touch and spontaneity,” says Hott. “When I was doing my show in Los Angeles and we had an earthquake, I was live on the air, and the building was shaking and I’m screaming. For anyone driving in their car, we were all experiencing that together. AI Ashley is going to keep talking.” But when AI Ashley gave away tickets to a Portland concert, those tuning in didn’t seem to mind. “They were excited, like they were talking to a radio personality,” says Elzinga. “They were like, ‘I got through and won something.’ They thought it was cool.”
The same company that worked on AI Ashley also reached out to Russ Mottla, program director at Iowa’s KFMW Rock 108, who was intrigued and heard a sample of how a female AI jock could sound. “The first attempts were awful,” he says. “She was very robotic.”
But after some tweaks, DJ Tori — name courtesy of Mottla — improved and premiered last year, spewing factoids about bands and records and spouting saucy banter. “I wasn’t delusional about it,” Mottla says. “Is it ready to be prime time? It’s not. But it gave us the opportunity to talk about something everybody’s talking about — ‘We have an AI DJ too’ — and make promos making fun of her. As far as our audience is concerned, we’re on a new trend. Some people like it. Some people don’t. But we’re claiming the position, as they say.” A local gun shop, Midwest Shooting, became an on-air sponsor and even hosted an appearance by DJ Tori in the store — a photo of “her” attached to a mannequin. As Mottla insists, “We’re not hiding anything from the audience. We’re having fun with it.”
In their defense, those who’ve turned to AI or are experimenting with it on radio argue that it’s a remedy for companies and stations that use pre-taped or syndicated shows during off hours or can’t afford overnight DJs. Before DJ Tori took over “her” slot, that time period on Rock 108 featured music and commercials but no DJ. “There are fewer and fewer shifts done live,” says veteran New York-area DJ Dennis Elsas, who hosts shows on Sirius XM and WFUV, the non-commercial public station. “More often than not, the overnight time after midnight is pre-taped.”
SonicTrek.ai’s Agovino insist his fledgling company’s goal, once it gets up and running, isn’t to “replace the successful midday jock” but to instead focus on local stations in smaller markets that use satellite feeds or voice tracking to fill up their airtime. “We built this as a strategy for radio stations that have, for whatever their rationale was at the time, drifted away from live and local,” he says. But says another longtime DJ who spoke anonymously in response to SonicTrek’s plans, “Smaller cities do use syndicated programs or don’t have anyone new to do [shifts], so that’s not new. But as the technology improves and as the standards lower over time, we’re not far away from something like that being on major stations. It’s very upsetting.”
“They should be freaked out,” Will.i.am says of those in radio who fear the coming of AI. “Because if AI is doing something that a human can do, then why does that have to exist? Only use AI with traditional radio if you cannot execute it with humans.”
At the same time, others in the industry feel that concerns about the death of the traditional human DJ are premature. “The audience is way more perceptive about subtle changes in personality than you might think,” says talent agent Paul Anderson of Workhouse Media, which represents numerous podcast and radio hosts. “People develop real relationships with their favorite personalities. And when you spend multiple hours a day listening to them while stuck in traffic, you can pick up on all those subtle intonations. If people find out that the storytelling is being done by an AI bot trying to replicate a known personality, the whole thing will fall apart.” Even Mottla, DJ Tori’s human boss, acknowledges that: “I can see the guys in the corner offices drooling over this, but people bond with DJs. You can’t create that with AI.”
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Some in the radio world took comfort when AI Ashley was yanked from the air earlier this year. According to Dylan Salisbury, the Portland program director overseeing the project at the time, AI Ashley didn’t result in “any dramatic lifts or decreases” in ratings. But he felt the time had come to wrap it up after two years. “I think the experiment ran its course,” says Salisbury. “We put it on the air, we were called every name under the sun and stood by what we did, and we got our peers [other stations] to buy into it, at least in some form. I’m glad we tried it. But I don’t know if, moving forward, an AI DJ is going to have a place on radio. As a society, we like AI but not when it comes to human connection.”
Then again, no one denies how fast the technology is moving, and how “much more likelife,” in Agovino’s words, AI voices now sound. That applies to DJ Tori too. “She sounds so much better now than when she first started,” Mottla says. “If they can make this kind of progress in 24 months, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like in another two years.”
