Digital Writer: How Czech Radio used AI to make a multi-season show and audiences didn’t hate it.

Search a dictionary for the definition of ‘writing’ and you’ll get something like:

NOUN

1. The activity, skill, or occupation of marking coherent words on paper and composing text, potentially for publication.

What only an author will tell you is that writing—particularly the creative kind—is frequently a frustrating, laborious, and heart-breaking business. Or it was, until the advent of large language models like ChatGPT.

Many people remain uncomfortable with the absence of human experience from narrative development. How can a story have value unless it reflects the lived memories of elation and anguish, fear and friendship, love and loss, that make it real?

But not everyone feels this way, including one promethean producer from Czech Radio (CR), who pounced on the idea of machine-written stories back in the gen-AI dark ages of 2020.