A hundred years ago, radio was the new form entertainment that captivated the world. The radio receiver occupied prime real estate in American living rooms and families would make sure that dinner was over and the dishes cleaned before the evening’s entertainment was broadcast to their radio. This was the first Golden Age of Radio.
Television
When TV came along, the radio would lose its place of prominence in the American living room. Radio, due to the advent of the transistor would find a new home in the bedrooms of teenagers and in the dashboard of automobiles. Radio’s original stars would move to the medium of television and radio would give birth to a new type of performer, the Disc Jockey aka the DJ.
It would be a position that didn’t exist before records or radio. It required a new kind of communication skill, one filled with personality and imagination.
Expiring Skills versus Permanent Skills
One of the most popular instructors at West Point was Robert Walter Weir. Weir taught painting and drawing offering this class not to broaden a cadet’s perspective on the world, but because in the 19th century, military officers were expected to draw maps of the battlefields they fought on, and be able to record their topography quickly.
One of Weir’s best students would be Union General Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated Confederate General Robert E. Lee during the Civil War.
Drawing, it turns out, was an expiring skill, as today’s West Point offers classes in mapping software and technology, but no longer in painting and drawing.
Morgan Housel, a partner at The Collaborative Fund and an expert on behavioral finance and history, says that every field has two kinds of skills:
- Expiring skills, which are vital at a given time but prone to diminishing as technology improves and a field evolves.
- Permanent skills, which were as essential 100 years ago as they are today, and will still be 100 years from now.
Is Being a DJ an Expiring Skill?
Over the past month, everyone’s been talking about what artificial intelligence (A.I.), like Futuri’s RadioGPT means for the future of air personalities. Radio owners seem to be excited about A.I. but radio personalities view this new technology with trepidation.
You might be wondering if being an air personality is something that will no longer be relevant and can be replaced by a robot.
If we’re talking about replacing mindless voice tracking, maybe A.I. is an improvement, but if we’re talking about making a human connection, I think not.
Most permanent skills are human-centric, meaning that they are not something a chatbot can duplicate. Sharing of human experiences can only be done by another human. Permanent skills require emotional intelligence which compound over time.
People who spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, will be ones in demand.
The Lesson of Family Feud
The popular TV game show, Family Feud, began airing on ABC in 1976. It would be the personal charm and witty banter of host Richard Dawson that would make the Feud hugely popular with television audiences.
The show continued on after Dawson left, hosted by Ray Combs, Louie Anderson, Richard Karn and John O’Hurley, but it wasn’t until radio star Steve Harvey took over in 2010 that Family Feud saw renewed success. Ratings for the program increased by as much as 40%, and has become the fifth most popular show in syndication being renewed once again through the 2025-2026 season.
By the way, Steve Harvey hosts the #1 syndicated morning radio show in America too.
Personalities like Steve Harvey are not worried about being replaced by artificial intelligence because they have developed a useful and permanent skill in a world that is constantly changing.
Being human is something artificial intelligence will never be.
DickTaylorBlog 
Your post is as always, insightful, and if buyers of radio talent valued human originality and creativity, they would agree. Unfortunately, they are looking to continue to cuts costs. As owner of a digital radio stations group, we are aggressively disrupting terrestrial radio in Houston.
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I remember having diner with Shotgun Tom Kelly and him expressing his frustration with advertisers or agencies wanting to have a voice talent do their copy, that sounded like Shotgun Tom Kelly.
He said, why don’t they just call me! I’m very affordable.
I can see where A.I. might be tried to do that in the future, which will open the controversy as to who owns that voice.
-DT
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I would like to believe this, Dick. Really, I would. But your very definition of being human (which AI can never be by definition) is rooted in “human-centric, emotional intelligence” – learned skills over seemingly millions of interactions overtime. Our impermanent physical selves are vessels for millions of lines of genetic coding that make our awareness and “humanity” possible. AI has the distinct advantage of considering vastly more information, around the clock, and evolving into the quirky “human like personalities” that stars like Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, and Steve Harvey were able to consistently project. Give these babies we call AI a few years with the silicon-neural-network-plasticity to evolve. And then hope they are as kind to us as we are to our organic pets that provide pleasure to have around. ExMachina, Skynet are not horribly imaginative. . . “it’s ok” as Michael Moore quipped about the raging insecurities of a white dominated world becoming a sidebar to the multicultural reality of the planet. We will still be here and important in our own ways – to each other at least, as we become less and less relevant to the mainstream of the surviving and dominant intelligent “life” on plant Earth. If Ken Jennings couldn’t beat the nascent Deep Blue, absent a successful dark age following a succesful “kill the machines” revolt, we don’t stand a chance. To be a witness to what will happen in the next fifty years will be fascinating. But we humanoids have a lot of life to live — on and off the radio.
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One thing I can most certainly agree with you on Mike is, never say never. (Though I said those very words with the following caveat.)
I truly believe that the soul of humanity will remain a distinct and separate entity; and it will, in my lifetime.
Humanity has a much bigger problem than A.I. and that’s what we’ve done to our planet Earth. We’ve seemingly out-smarted ourselves, to our peril.
-DT
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When it occurred that I lacked “permanency”as an on-air personality (and a face for radio), I slipped behind the scenes as a producer-director, cinematographer, and voice-over talker. Served me well the next 30yr until these “talents” became unneeded for disappearing mid-scale productions, that luckily coincided with retirement, when I could still be busy as a PT engineering consultant, author, and grandfather with no complaints or regrets for myself, but lots for the state of radio.
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ChatGPT, and presumably RadioGPT, simply predict, using a probability model, what the next word will be that a human would be likely to say. It’s not human, but it “learns.” I think it can be entertaining and perceptive, but it will always be deceptive absent full disclosure that the listener is actually hearing a cleverly programmed computer. IMHO once that’s revealed, the “voice” will be perceived differently by the listener. They may very well feel manipulated, and resent it. However, as with other forms of what we referred to in the 60s as “plastic,“ it may come to be accepted.
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I would agree with you Dennis. If all people are familiar with coming out of their radio is mindless voice tracking or syndication, then A.I. may seem as a big improvement.
What we felt made radio so important to people, sadly, may be a thing of the past. Good at that point in time, but no longer necessary.
I have no problem talking to Alexa, but I realize that it’s a computer that I’m interfacing with and that this synthesized voice simply makes it easier for me to communication.
I love my voice command with my Garmin GPS, it allows me to make changes while driving and never taking my hands of the steering wheel or eyes off the road.
However, I feel there may always be a place for a well-programmed, personality driven radio format.
-DT
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Hey Dick, I wouldn’t lump Syndication in with Mindless. But if you mean mindless Syndication…well, I’m not sure what that’d be. Maybe if Alexa got her own syndie show ?
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I see your point. Syndication is different than voice tracking a bunch of radio stations.
However, running syndication due to a barter deal or just for a buck, without considering your audience and your format, would be mindless.
-DT
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