Meet Thy – the radio host I don’t think exists

Have AI personalities already infiltrated the Australian media?

I got an interesting tipoff the other day that Sydney radio station CADA is using an AI avatar instead of an actual radio host.

The story goes that their workdays presenter – a woman called Thy – actually doesn’t exist. She’s a character made using AI, and rolled out onto CADA’s website.

Sadly, this accusation didn’t sound very outlandish to me. But if you’ve been in media for a while, as I’ve been, you’ll know that rumours are plentiful and only sometimes true. So I decided to do a bit of sleuthing and see whether Thy is, in fact, a human.

The only places which mention Thy are websites for CADA and its parent company ARN. Thy’s show page says: “Every weekday from 11am-3pm while you are at work, driving around, doing the commute on public transport or at uni, Thy will be playing you the hottest tracks from around the world.

Curated by our music experts, these are the songs that are charting or on the cusp of blowing up – hear it first with Thy so you can boast to your friends and say you were all over it first.”

What is Thy’s last name? Who is she? Where did she come from? There is no biography, or further information about the woman who is supposedly presenting this show.

Compare that to the (recently resigned) breakfast presenter Sophie Nathan or the drive host K-Sera. Both their show pages include multi-paragraph biographies which include details about their careers and various accolades. They both have a couple of different photos taken during various press shoots.

But perhaps the strangest thing about Thy is that she appears to be a young woman in her 20s who has absolutely no social media presence. This is particularly unusual for someone who works in the media, where the size of your audience is proportionate to your bargaining power in the industry.

There are no photos or videos of Thy on CADA’s socials, either. It seems she was photographed just once and then promptly turned invisible.

It’s not just Thy’s lack of social media presence which is unusual. It’s her lack of presence… anywhere.

It’s impossible to say when Thy started on the workday show, because there were no announcements made about her being hired. This might not be unusual in most industries, but in audio you can’t make an exceptional cup of tea in the office kitchenette without a press release going to trade publications like MediaWeek and Radio Today. It seems very odd that CADA hired a new ethnically-diverse woman to their youth station and then just forgot to tell anyone.

Even internally no one seems to know Thy. Several people I’ve spoken to say they’ve never heard of her, there were no message board welcomes when she joined the company, and her name and email does not come up on the intranet.

So to hunt down Thy, all I had to go on is her first name and the singular picture which has been taken of her.

A Google image search shows this photo appears just twice online, both times are on company websites. This means it hasn’t appeared on press releases, or on Thy’s personal Linkedin, or any other number of places you might expect a press shot to end up.

More curious than ever, I tuned into Thy’s show on Friday. She didn’t talk once.

Perhaps Thy was sick that day?

So I decided to listen back to previous shows, using the radio archiving tool Flashback. Thy hasn’t been on air for the last fortnight. Before then, the closest thing to a radio host can be found just before the top of the hour. A rather mechanical-sounding female voice announces what songs are coming up. This person does not give her name, and none of the sweepers announce her or the show.

I noticed that on two different days, Thy announced ‘old school’ songs. On the 25th it was “old school Beyonce”, and then on the 26th it was “old school David Guetta”. Across two different days, the intonation was, I thought, strikingly similar.

To illustrate the point, I isolated the voice, and layered them on to audio tracks. There is a bit of interference from the imperfectly-removed song playing underneath the voice, but the host sounds identical in both instances.

Despite all this evidence, there’s still is a slim chance that Thy is a person. She might be someone who doesn’t like social media and is a bit shy around the office. Or perhaps she’s a composite of a couple of real people: someone who recorded her voice to be synthesised, another who’s licensing her image. In either case, Thy I owe you several drinks or vapes or whatever Generation Z kids consume these days.

But if Thy isn’t real, this is a profound misstep by CADA and their parent company of ARN.

Like many Australian media companies, ARN has a very white on-air talent lineup. How white? Well, I looked through the host lineup for KIIS, GOLD and CADA – ARN’s three major radio brands which broadcast around the country. Across nine stations, it seems that there’s only one person who outwardly presents as diverse.

It’s Thy.

Even assuming Thy’s a real person, that’s a very poor showing.

But if she isn’t real? Did one of the biggest FM radio companies in the country invent an Asian woman rather than… hiring someone who was Asian?

Surely not, right? It’s hard to believe a business as large as ARN would make such an obvious blunder. And for what? To save on one part-time junior radio host’s salary? You could pay someone $30 an hour to do that job. Assuming they sat in the studio for the entirety of the shift, we’re talking about $35,000. It’s a paltry amount of cash.

You’d think that, along the line of this being okayed, at least one highly-paid person would point out that it’s pretty bad optics if the only multicultural host on your entire network is actually AI. Moreover, giving this avatar a name which rhymes with AI is not clever, and people would likely be very angry or very offended if they found out.

It’s hard to imagine how any company – let alone a media company – could be this out of touch.

Frankly, it’s bizarre that I had to investigate this story at all. Does the future of media mean audiences will be forced to debate whether or not the people hosting our shows exist? It’s a modern, surrealist version of McCarthyism.

We should not be in this situation.

It should be an absolute given that a large media company would not surreptitiously use fake AI personalities. Surely if there is one last bastion of reality in this increasingly hellish bog of computer-generated slop, it should be the people who have government-issued licenses to broadcast.

The fact that is not the case is deeply concerning.

As a matter of urgency, there needs to be some reform to ensure that the media discloses when content has been produced, in part or wholly, using AI.

If we can’t look to radio, print or television as a trusted authority on what is real and what is computer generated, then we will have nowhere left to turn.

Editor’s note: Since publishing this story, I’ve been reliably told that Thy’s photo belongs to a real employee who does not work on air, and who goes by a different name.

I’ve had another source confirm that the voice tracks are compiled using AI. This is not disclosed anywhere on CADA’s websites.

ARN has a publicised enterprise agreement with AI speech generation company ElevenLabs.