Will.i.am on Wednesday laid out his AI plan to change radio forever.
At the Dreamforce tech conference in San Francisco, the Black Eye Peas front man, entrepreneur and investor switched on RAiDiO.FYI, an interactive, conversational media platform that ushers radio into the AI age, offering listeners two-way communication with an AI persona to dive deeper into music, sports, talk radio, politics, and pop culture.
“I call it interruptible, interactive, intelligent media,” the musician told Techstrong Group during a 40-minute interview. “This architecture is what radio needs at this time. “Our innovation on radio is to give you local news, breaking events, on-demand topics, and we’re bringing this to television, terrestrial radio, media companies and major car makers.”
If video in the form of MTV helped save the radio star, Will.i.am envisions the concept of an interactive text-to-station applying to not only radio but learning, fitness, advertising and do-it-yourself tasks.
One such accord, with the Earn Your Leisure organization to promote its Invest Fest conference in Atlanta last month, created a “hyper-curated” station to replace a paper program for speaker profiles and the event’s schedule.
Will.i.am’s latest venture, which competes with the likes of Spotify’s AI DJ, is already available to nine stations with access to FYI (Focus Your Ideas), a communication and collaboration app created by FY.AI, another will.i.am startup founded in 2020.
Each station appears as a so-called project within the app, where the AI host’s script, music, and segments, are loaded in as a “mega prompt.” AI personas also have limited web browsing capabilities and can pull information from trusted news sources, according to will.i.am.
For nearly two decades, will.i.am has been thinking about AI, assessing its impact and narrative arc.
He said a dystopian era of technology he refers to as HI, or Human Ignorance, marred by greed and system tripwires, will gradually transition to AI adoption and disruption that leads to mass white-collar displacement of jobs for lawyers, bankers and bean counters.
Conversely, hyper-creatives will thrive in the AI age and text-to-music will be “amazing with stuff we’ve never heard,” he said. “The dreamers will step up. AI is an ally to the creative community. There will be new experiential music, not just passive listening.”
Where is it all headed? The AI entrepreneur offers his own particular vision based on the mind as much as matter.
“Flying cars and robots are science fiction where futuristic coordinates are executed,” he said. “But what is sci-fact? What is the new future? I think of spiritual fiction coming to AI. ‘Star Wars’ had Jedi, which is spirituality at its highest human level. How do we get to spiritual fiction? Fictional fantasy. It is coming.”
“The 2020’s will be a mid-journey to generative AI and the ’30s will rock,” will.i.am added. “The awakened generation will dial into the right coordinates, and I can’t wait for it to happen.”
