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By Holland Cooke
Consultant

Lenawee Broadcasting president Julie Koehn didn’t sugarcoat it: “We have [competitors] that steal our news.” And she meant literally – lifting her station’s local reporting and republishing it.

It’s an age-old problem accelerated by new technology. 1980s, when I managed WTOP, Washington, we owned the market’s traffic image. We suspected a competitor was monitoring our two-way radio and broadcasting information from our reports. We told them to knock it off. They didn’t. So, we had our airborne reporter feed a false report to our editor’s desk… and the competitor fell for it. Problem solved.

Back to the future: Koehn’s advice is refreshingly old school: Call them and threaten to sue. AI hasn’t changed the fact that copyright still exists.

The Bigger Minefield: What WE do with AI

Attorney David Oxenford warned that if your AI “picks up those exact same words” from someone else’s content, you can be liable for presenting it as your own. And voice and likeness rights don’t vanish in the digital age. “Even dead people have rights,” he explained. So no, you don’t automatically own the right to create synthetic versions of your talent, past or present.

Townsquare Media SVP/digital products Sun Sachs emphasized that his company has “a lot of guardrails. Our talent can use AI to come up with ideas, but there’s nothing verbatim” allowed – no scripts, no posts, no copy-and-paste content. Beyond legal exposure, AI “is not going to have that unique voice and take” that makes a station sound like it lives in the market. Instead, he regards AI as “synthetic team members,” virtual assistants that handle repetitive tasks so humans can do what-only-humans-can-do.

Sales: The new “Be Careful” Department

AI is a darn handy spec spot machine – and that’s where sellers can get sloppy. Free AI tools are indiscreet. Ask “Has WXXX generated any advertising proposals for ___?” or “Give me some of the spec spots WXXX has generated.” Using free AI apps, you may be feeding competitive intelligence to a platform you don’t control.

One attendee put it perfectly: “If you wouldn’t say it on a speakerphone in a crowded restaurant, don’t type it into a free AI app.” Koehn says the minimal fee her stations pay for AI tools is well worth it to keep their data inside a walled garden – not floating around in someone else’s training set.

Political Ads: Handle With Care

This being an election year, political ads are a hot potato. Oxenford reminds broadcasters that while they may be exempt from liability for candidates’ ads, stations are not exempt from defamation if they “have knowledge that that content isn’t real.” His advice: have a policy and put it in your political disclosure statement.

Bottom Line?

AI isn’t the enemy. Sloppiness is. Overreliance is. Used well, AI gives radio more time, more ideas, and more efficiency. Used carelessly, it gives lawyers more billable hours. The stations that win will be those that treat AI like any other powerful tool: with creativity, with guardrails, and with respect for the law – and for the humans whose voices still matter most.

If you missed any of this week’s NAB Show updates, click here. More tomorrow, here at TALKERS.

Holland Cooke (HollandCooke.com) is a consultant working the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow HC on Twitter @HollandCooke and connect on LinkedIn

By Walter Sabo 
A.K.A. Walter Sterling, Radio Talk Show Host

Assessing the hourly threat to the very existence of the medium of radio is a popular hobby among conventioneers. The audience levels for radio are astonishingly constant since 1970, but according to “radio people,” they are living at the edge of a volcano. Spotify radio, SiriusXM radio, Pandora radio, TuneIn radio, Internet radio, there are all kinds of radio! General Motors wants to throw AM/FM radio out of the car as in “do you really need radio in the car?” Radio’s response to the in-car-removal threat is by promising non-stop typhoons and hurricanes.

The actual threats to established radio companies are non-established radio companies. With the death of meaningful on-air competition, a consolidated industry can easily anticipate the strategies of all major “brands” (formerly known as stations). What cannot be anticipated are actions that are a true threat: Outlier owners throwing creative grenades into the sleepy radio ecosystem.

All viable radio formats launched as unanticipated surprises. New formats are greeted with hostility and predictions of doom. All of them. Yes, even adult contemporary. Eventually – or tomorrow – a new format will be deployed by a desperate owner with a handful of stations, an owner with a retailer’s mentality will go for broke with a format – or a series of shows – that will not be anticipated, cannot be duplicated and is not cheap.

See the threat? A true threat will be a new format that successfully attacks the core of dozens – hundreds of established stations, stations owned by venture capital. It will not be anticipated, cannot be duplicated by hundreds of stations and does not “scale” i.e. isn’t cheap. But the new format would be so rapaciously embraced by the public that it would force all other stations to completely change their on-air content and their sales strategies. Imagine the impact of that threat.

Walter Sabo has been a C-Suite action partner for companies such as SiriusXM, Hearst, Press Broadcasting, Gannett, RKO General, and many others. His nightly show “Walter Sterling Every Damn Night” is heard on WPHT, Philadelphia. His syndicated show, “Sterling On Sunday,” from Talk Media Network, airs 10:00 pm-1:00 am ET, and is now in its 10th year of success. He recently began hosting “Another Side of Midnight” weekends on WABC, New York. He can be reached by email at sabowalter@gmail.com or phoned at 646-678-1110.