“This program may be pre-recorded”

[Kelly A]

^^^^ You make some good points, but when I read in the news articles periodically about AI eventually eliminating about half the jobs in the US economy, over the next couple decades possibly, I would hazard a guess that your broadcast media conglomerates would be definitely on that bandwagon.

But robots and automated technologies have always replaced humans doing repetitious assembly jobs, or tasks that can be done by much smaller or less expensive devices. A good quality cart machine used to set a station back between two and six thousand dollars. Stations would have typically at least six of those machines. Now you can buy a workstation that can play all your station audio for less than a thousand bucks, plus literally walk away while it does the work for you. That workstation isn't AI. It's jusy a PC with a sound card that plays a list of audio clips. Oh, and you don't need to buy expensive tape cartridges or clean tape heads every couple days. No tape hiss introduced by tape carts either.

It's not like technology hasn't eliminated / replaced radio and broadcast jobs before. Even here on RD, the experts have admitted that tech eliminated radio jobs over the years.

My example above replaced board ops, in-person airstaff, or having to staff 24/7. Again; not even close to being AI. It's an inexpensive replacement for what used to be expensive and elaborate separate devices which usually required a lot of human intervention.

AI is tech. And the definition of "AI" has also altered from the specific one you have been using. After all, what is 'intelligence'? Is a spider, which exhibits less brain power than a laptop computer, 'intelligent'?

Again; a series of sounds produced by an electronic device does not make it intelligent. No more than the aforementioned PC playing a series of songs, commercials, promos, jingles etc. from a list created by a human is AI. A human speaking (producing sounds), produced by a brain means the sounds are created by an (assumed) form of intelligence.
There is no motivation for radio stations to have a computer use information scraped from social media to drive a digital speech sound generator transmitted over radio. The station loses control over how their station is being presented. Now if a station decided to use a modern version of a digitalker chip to play back liners over the radio, that's not intelligence either. It's playing a sound file, just as when a thousand dollar PC plays a sound file.
If you want to call synthesized voice as technology, I would agree with that label. It's simply not a form of AI technology.

 

[TexasTom]

Exactly...buy American is a wonderful ideal. We all love the way it sounds. Until we look at the specifics. We used to have a very successful electronics industry in this country. We built TVs and radios in the USA! Then Japan did it cheaper, then Mexico did it cheaper, then Korea did it cheaper, and now it's China. The only way to get a 55" TV for $300 is to have it made in China (which is what I did for the TV I'm watching now).

That Japan did it cheaper isn't entirely true, early on they competed primarily on price but by the seventies the Japanese were competing on the merit of their products. It was more on a matter of quality and innovation -- the Japanese manufacturers went to solid state designs while the big American companies were still building with vacuum tubes. When I bought my first color TV, the GE and Panasonic models were the same price -- but I went with the Panasonic because I thought it would last longer. And it did...it finally went out after about 40 years, although it was functionally obsolete before then. I didn't consider a Sony, because it would have cost more than pretty much any other brand...but even then, it was widely acknowledged that Sony color TVs produced a better picture than any of their American competitors. And if you wanted a VCR, you were going to buy Japanese because the American companies never even bothered to compete -- that RCA VCR was built by Panasonic's parent company, and the Zenith VCR was built by Sony.