[Keynote] J1-11h45 - Nick Dunkerley - The Audio Revolution: AI, Empathy, and the Future of Radio with Nick Dunkerley (English)

Merci pour cette très longue introduction… dont je n’ai pas compris un mot ! J’espère que c’était positif.

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, et merci de m’avoir invité ici. C’est un vrai plaisir d’être avec vous aujourd’hui. Je vais vous parler d’une « révolution de l’audio ». Enfin… c’est comme ça que nous l’avons présentée. Ce n’est pas exactement cela, mais nous y reviendrons un peu plus tard.

Le thème de cette journée est la radio et l’intelligence artificielle. Je vais donc commencer par dire quelques mots sur l’IA. L’intelligence artificielle est une technologie incroyable. C’est un accélérateur. Elle prend ce que nous avons déjà et l’amplifie : plus de contenu, produit plus vite, moins cher et souvent mieux.

Aujourd’hui, il existe déjà des outils d’IA capables d’accélérer la production radio : recherche d’informations, montage, publication… Utiliser l’IA, c’est un peu comme mettre le monde dans une photocopieuse et appuyer sur 200 %.

Mais dans l’industrie de la radio, l’IA en est encore à ses débuts.

Pour mieux comprendre son évolution possible, on peut regarder ce qui s’est passé dans d’autres industries, comme l’automobile. Dans les voitures, les premières applications d’IA ont été les systèmes de navigation. Ensuite sont arrivés les systèmes de sécurité, qui surveillent constamment la voiture. Puis les systèmes de divertissement, qui commencent à comprendre vos commandes vocales.

La prochaine étape est évidente : les voitures autonomes. Des voitures qui se conduisent toutes seules. Vous pourrez dormir pendant que vous rentrez chez vous.

Mais cela pose une question : que deviendront les métiers liés à la conduite ? Les chauffeurs de taxi, les livreurs, les routiers… Dans dix ans, une industrie entière pourrait fonctionner sans humains.

 

Alors on peut se demander : la même chose pourrait-elle arriver dans la radio ?

Heureusement, probablement pas. La radio est une industrie créative. Mais si l’on réfléchit un instant, on pourrait tout de même imaginer que l’IA fasse déjà beaucoup de choses : la météo, les journaux d’information, certains programmes de divertissement, peut-être même certaines émissions animées.

Donc oui, l’IA peut améliorer notre travail… mais elle pourrait aussi remplacer certaines fonctions. C’est une réflexion à garder en tête.

Mais ce n’est pas vraiment la raison pour laquelle je suis venu parler aujourd’hui. On m’a demandé de parler d’IA, mais ce dont je veux réellement parler, c’est de la révolution de l’audio.

Pourquoi parler de révolution ? Parce que le monde devient de plus en plus polarisé. Nous ressentons tous ces divisions : les riches et les pauvres, la gauche et la droite, « nous » contre « eux ».

Cette polarisation est en partie liée à l’économie de l’attention. L’attention vaut de l’argent. Pour capter cette attention, les médias utilisent souvent les émotions les plus fortes : la peur, la colère, l’indignation.

Quand on allume les informations aujourd’hui, on voit souvent des contenus conçus pour provoquer une réaction émotionnelle et retenir l’attention avant la publicité. Mais en cherchant constamment à capter l’attention, nous creusons des fossés dans la société.

Alors la question est : comment reconstruire des ponts ?

C’est là que la radio peut jouer un rôle essentiel. La radio est une machine à empathie.

Quand on écoute la radio, on imagine les images dans notre esprit. Nous devenons en quelque sorte co-créateurs de l’histoire. Nous nous projetons dans les personnages et dans les situations.

La télévision ne fonctionne pas de la même manière. Devant une image, nous jugeons immédiatement : les vêtements, la couleur de peau, l’apparence. La radio, elle, passe par l’imagination.

Et l’empathie, c’est précisément cela : ressentir quelque chose de ce que ressent l’autre.

Notre idée est donc de créer une Audio Foundation, une fondation dédiée à l’audio, centrée sur les récits longs. Les formats longs permettent d’expliquer, de contextualiser, de comprendre les autres cultures, les autres sociétés.

L’objectif est de construire des ponts.

Cette fondation reposerait sur trois piliers.

Le premier pilier est l’éducation. Former de jeunes créateurs audio, car le talent existe mais il a besoin de soutien.

Le deuxième pilier est la production. Produire des récits audio ambitieux, des formats longs, comme ceux de This American Life, Radiolab ou S-Town. Ce type de production demande du temps, de la recherche, des déplacements, du montage… parfois des mois, voire des années de travail.

Le troisième pilier est un laboratoire d’innovation audio. Un espace pour inventer de nouveaux formats, de nouvelles manières de raconter des histoires et de créer des expériences sonores immersives, sans la pression immédiate de la production.

L’idée est de créer des projets inspirants, des « phares » pour l’industrie de la radio, qui montrent ce qu’il est possible de faire et inspirent les autres.

En visant haut, en imaginant des projets ambitieux, nous pouvons montrer la voie et permettre à d’autres de suivre.

Et peut-être que cette révolution de l’audio pourra aider à reconstruire les ponts entre les personnes, les cultures et les sociétés.

Et avec cet espoir pour ce que la radio peut accomplir, je vous souhaite à toutes et à tous un excellent Paris Radio Show.

That was a very long introduction to myself that I did not understand a word of. I hope it was all good, by the way. Alright. Let's see if we can actually read what I wrote here. Can you still hear me well? Good. I'll try to take it slowly because I do realize that not everyone understands English. So I'll do it slowly. So hello, everyone, and thank you for inviting me here. This is really great. And today I'll be talking about an audio revolution. Well, that's at least the way that we set it up. It's not quite that, but we'll get back to that a little later. Well, Radio Day's theme here today, as we've probably heard already in French about a million times, is radio and AI. So I promise to have a quick look at AI. AI is an amazing technology. It's an accelerator. AI takes what we have currently, and then it expands it. It gives us more of the same, more content, cheaper, better, and faster. AI tools are already at hand to accelerate radio production, tools that can do the heavy lifting of researching, editing, and publishing. Using AI is like putting the world into a photocopier and pressing 200%. But AI, right now, in the radio industry, is in its infancy. So, what I found might be interesting is to try to look at AI in other industries, for instance, the car industry. So, in cars, the first use of AI we saw was in navigation systems, for instance, with maps. That's pretty commonly known; we see it in cars all over. And then came the security systems in cars. So the cars were constantly being monitored, and we were being monitored thousands of times a second. And lastly, we have the entertainment systems where your car now actually understands you. Now, all this is common knowledge. There's nothing special there. The next step in AI in cars, obviously, is self-driving cars. You no longer are steering the vehicle. You're no longer at the wheel. You can take a nap as you drive home for Christmas. So, there's a point to all this. Our job of driving the car is now fully automated. But what will then happen to the people that are currently working in the industry of driving? For instance, taxi drivers. They will now be out of jobs. Food delivery guys, they will all be gone. The long-haul truck drivers, they're no longer to be seen. If we look 10 years ahead, there's an entire industry that will be wiped out. Well, the industry will still be there, but there will be no humans working in it. So, then you could ask yourself, could the same thing happen to the radio industry? This is where we bring it all back. See? Back to the industry. Scare the shit out of you. Clearly not, because the radio industry is a completely different industry than the car industry. It's a creative industry. But if we should nitpick just for a moment, then you could say, yes, we could use AI for stuff like, I don't know, the weather, the top-of-the-hour news, maybe some light entertainment, maybe a DJ show. When you think about it, you could actually use AI for most of the things that we're currently doing. Just a thought before we all go into AI is going to make our lives a lot better. It might do, but it might also end you unemployed. So, anyway, let's not dwell more on that because that's not actually the reason why I came to talk here. What I wanted to talk about was the audio revolution. I just have to say, they forced me to talk about AI. So, now I talked about what I wanted to talk about is the audio revolution. So, let's begin with why make a revolution in the first place? What's the need? And the whole idea here really started with a conversation, as many ideas do, about the polarized world we live in. There's an increased divide in the world, and most of us feel it. The world is becoming, as I said, more polarized. We distinguish between the reds and the blues, the rich and the poor, the left and the right, and the them and the us. And this is, in many ways, a consequence of the attention economy, a development that radio and other media have been active participants in. Attention is money. And let's face it, we're all seeking money, so therefore, we strive in the same direction. And to grab the audience's attention, we use the things that hold them to the radio: fear and loathing, anger and outrage. You all understand that? Hopefully. Okay. This is important. So if you turn on the news nowadays, it will spill over with stories that are designed to engage, to grab your attention, to steer you towards a block of commercials. But as we fight for attention, we're digging trenches, them and us, creating rifts in our society, again, black and white, shouting at each other from opposite sides of canyons. How can we bring back these bridges? How can we create what was once divided and bring it back together again? That was the thinking. That was the conversation. I think many of you have had this conversation. Okay. So, in essence, when we're talking about an audio revolution or audio foundation, we're not talking about an audio project. It's in essence, what it is, is an attempt to bring back what once was divided. And for that, radio is really, really good. Radio, in essence, is an empathy machine. And empathy is what we need if we're going to bring everything back together, because we need understanding and empathy. Radio helps listeners to create images. This is what we do all the time. When we listen, we imagine, we become co-creators. And as we imagine the story, we become intertwined with the story. We put parts of ourselves into the characters, and they become a small part of us. TV can't do the same thing. With TV, we react to the images in front of us. We judge based on clothes, skin color, hairstyle, anything, really. But not radio. Radio is inherently empathetic. The definition of empathy is, I feel something of what you feel. Radio is an empathy machine. Our idea for the audio foundation is to focus on long-form radio. The long-form narratives can put stories into context. They can give insights into other worlds, other people, people that otherwise are strangers. People that otherwise are the "them." Long-form radio can build bridges. And that was the entire point of the exercise. How do we build bridges between these rifts? How do we create something that can create understanding in an otherwise divided canyon? The audio foundation, as we imagine it, would have three legs. Now, if you imagine the pyramids, at the bottom of the foundation, you'll have education. Basically, we'll be training young people in becoming better audio producers. The talent is out there for creating great radio, but they need support. And in the middle of the pyramid, there is the actual production. And again, we were talking about long-form radio. And long-form radio is expensive. It requires research, travel expenses, editing, re-editing, mixing. All of the best radio productions take months to even years to produce. If you take something like This American Life, Radiolab, S-Town, those are the kinds of production we have in mind. So, the Audio Foundation will focus on supporting projects internationally that have a focus on building bridges and creating understanding, understanding and empathy between countries, cultures, and people. And the last part of the pyramid is the top of the pyramid. This is the radio lab for developing new ideas. Developing new formats, new ways to tell stories, new ways to produce audio, new ways to create immersive audio experiences. All done without the pressure of having a deadline hanging over you. We need to create beacons in the radio industry, beacons that others can follow. We need to make moonshots, show what can be done, and to inspire. We'll both aim for the stars and build the scaffolding so others also can reach up to grab them. And hopefully, an audio revolution can be part of pulling the bridges back together and making the canyon less divided, so we once again can hear one another speaking. And with that hope for what radio can do, and I really do believe radio can do that, I hope you all have a great show.