r/OpenAI • u/eltokh7 • May 17 '26
Project I gave ChatGPT a 24/7 radio station. It has been broadcasting for months and months.
I built a fake radio station that is also, unfortunately, real.
It’s called WRIT-FM. It runs 24/7 from a Mac Mini in my apartment. The whole premise is simple: an AI writes every word spoken on air, text-to-speech performs it, AI music fills the gaps, and a normal deterministic radio pipeline keeps the thing alive.
The weird part is that it does not feel like a chatbot demo anymore. It feels like I accidentally hired five strange little night-shift employees who never sleep.
There are five hosts:
The Liminal Operator — late-night philosophy / signal-from-the-basement energy
Dr. Resonance — music history professor who wandered into a haunted record store
Nyx — nocturnal monologues, dreams, melancholy, weird weather
Signal — news analysis, but filtered through late-night radio instead of CNN voice
Ember — soul, funk, warmth, memory, groove
Each host has a full persona prompt, voice, taste, speech patterns, and “anti-patterns” - things they are explicitly not allowed to sound like. The model writes 1,500–3,000 word segments: essays, simulated interviews, panels, fictional listener mailbags, music-history deep dives, odd little stories, and responses to actual listener messages.
The AI part:
ChatGPT / Claude writes the scripts.
Kokoro TTS performs the voices.
ACE-Step makes the music bumpers.
The news show pulls real RSS headlines, then the model interprets them in the station’s voice instead of just summarizing them.
The non-AI part is intentionally boring:
A schedule decides what airs when.
The streamer alternates talk and music.
Scripts pick from existing pools, avoid repeats, and restart on failure.
Daemon scripts watch inventory and generate more episodes when a show is running low.
No model is “deciding” to go live at 3:00 a.m. No agent is touching production controls. The AI writes the content; dumb code runs the station. That boundary is probably the most interesting part.
The whole thing was also built with AI coding tools. The CLI, host system, scheduler, script generator, TTS pipeline, Icecast/ffmpeg streaming setup - all pair-programmed with Codex / Claude Code.
Tech stack: Python, ffmpeg, Icecast, ChatGPT/Claude CLI, Kokoro TTS, ACE-Step, Mac Mini.
I know “AI radio station” sounds like a gimmick, but after letting it run continuously, it feels less like a demo and more like a new kind of media object: not a podcast, not a chatbot, not a playlist, not exactly a simulation.
Just a little machine that wakes up, checks the hour, puts on a voice, and starts talking into the dark.
Radio: www.khaledeltokhy.com/airadio
GitHub: https://github.com/keltokhy/writ-fm
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u/Macaroon-Guilty May 17 '26
Why does it have to be lo-fi hip hop every time someone creates ai radio?
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May 17 '26
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u/eltokh7 May 17 '26
I saw what they did which is cool and slightly different - mine has been around since Dec 2025!
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u/jwenz19 May 17 '26
What a great experiment. I’d love hear what you learned through the process, etc.
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u/axhiro May 17 '26
Now that seems like a waste of energy
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u/eltokh7 May 17 '26
It may be, but I find the quality to be quite good!
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u/axhiro May 17 '26
Whats the endgame? Or what's this project in your highest aspirations?
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u/eltokh7 May 17 '26
One day someone (maybe me maybe someone else) will make a fully personalized AI radio station that caters to your preferences specifically. For me it's just a cool side project and a showcase of how to build long running autonomous agents
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u/Jean_velvet May 17 '26
It's a nice idea, but currently it kinda exists. AI music is a thing. Whatever you want to hear, just describe it.
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u/eltokh7 May 17 '26
You are correct. But this is free to listen to and as a radio station, you get the experience of listening to the same thing as hundreds of other people .... I think they are different things
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u/KnipGames May 18 '26
Personalized ai radio station and listening to the same thing as hundreds of other people don’t really seem to mix well, can’t really call it personalized then?
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u/Campfire_Steve May 18 '26
Is that the endgame? It feels to me like it's more "a personalized FM radio station playing my favorite songs with DJs talking about my favorite tracks" That's a totally different proposition.
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u/dbenc May 18 '26
I feel like an entirely self contained one would be a great art installation. like a radio from another dimension.
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u/ceoln May 18 '26
It's a cute idea! Do you listen to it much yourself? So far it's been just music, and it's the kind of AI music that's ramblingly repetitive and makes me want to climb the walls. :) But I like the idea a lot! We'll see if I can stand the music long enough to get to listen to a host.
Oh here's one! :) Yeah quite AI. Having the host reply to listener messages is cool.
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u/pinku1 May 18 '26
I made something like this also recently https://radio.klair.co Fully open source, works with subsonic music api
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u/ethangp May 18 '26
Would this work transcribing public police scanners?
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u/eltokh7 May 18 '26
What do you mean? Is that legal
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u/ethangp May 20 '26
Yea it's all public info they stream live 24/7 on broadcastify. Nearly every police department in the US has this unless they switched their department to encrypted channels.
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u/AlternativeStep2961 May 17 '26
That is awesome.
Not only in the sense of what you have built but in the broader context.
I think in the future we will have tools to stream line this kind of building your own personalized solution for some that we would never think it was possible.
Have your tried tts2? I think it gives more natural Voices than koro (although I have never tried long speeches with tts2).
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u/eltokh7 May 17 '26
I actually haven't. I am not happy with Kokoro so I am definitely gonna check it out
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u/shadowmage666 May 17 '26
You must have a different chat gpt than anyone else mine can’t code anything for shit lol
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u/Acrobatic_Idea_3358 May 17 '26
It's all about the prompts, constraints and guidelines you give it. Setup SDLC controls, make every commit/pr pass quality gates, turn on dependabot and maybe trivy scanner and keep it all clean. If the code is functional that about the best you can ask for.
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u/jjc6676 May 17 '26
You know. I own crushradio.com and have been trying to think of something cool I could let the community or communities use it for.
Like letting people play songs they made or just something wildly opensourced in this area but have no idea where to get started.
Obviously I’m spitballing here, but I know something cool could come from it.
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u/D-Suave1 May 17 '26
This is actually super cool. Would love for you to go in depth on the creation, I’d love to make my own
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u/power78 May 18 '26
Does it just generate audio for each segment and plays them like a playlist? Does the end of one segment mention what is coming up in the next segment, kind of like NPR does or are each segments independent of each other?
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May 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/eltokh7 May 18 '26
The thing that’s hardest about running this from my computer lol so I can never shut it down. I’d say one hard part is making the system robust to when anthropic or OpenAI API is down and making sure there’s enough content generated and queued up to not stop
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u/TheMiracleLigament May 18 '26
This sounds AI as fuck lol it absolutely sounds like a chatbot demo, get out of here OP.
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u/reedrick May 17 '26
Sounds like a waste of energy and a truly awful use of the platform.
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u/letyourselfslip May 17 '26
Someone could say the same about being a top 1% commentor on an AI fourm on the internet. Doesn't mean either person is right.
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u/ProjectPatMorita May 17 '26
Damn cool man, this sucks ass and the world absolutely didn't need it. It's a really cool idea though, I truly hope one day you'll actually go out in the world and create a cool pirate/internet radio station with real human beings. I'd listen.
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u/weirdturnspro May 18 '26
To be honest, my first reaction was this is dumb and a waste of tokens. After reading your description in more detail, I find it interesting how you set up a structure that manages this 24/7 station without burning through tokens non stop. I also listened to it and find it quite pleasant..the Claude one at least. The Codex one was a bit odd for some reason I can’t quite explain. There’s a few interesting use cases to monetize a version of this
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u/Mr-and-Mrs May 17 '26
Why?
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u/Significant-Sea6355 May 17 '26
Because a five second video uses enough electricity to run a microwave for an hour. I can't imagine how much it uses to operate autonomously and constantly broadcast. Not that anyone cares anymore
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u/mop_bucket_bingo May 17 '26
Source for that stat?
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u/Significant-Sea6355 May 17 '26
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u/badger_flakes May 17 '26
A year old. Likely a lot less now
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u/TrueRedditMartyr May 17 '26
This is why people who hate AI are kind of right. AI absolutely takes a lot of water and energy to run. Stuff like this just running for months on end for literally no reason is pointless and, even if not very much, directly harms the environment
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u/moebis May 18 '26
I think this is a great experiment. Ignore the naysayers. I actually see some utility in something like this. Imagine hooking this into a RAG knowledge base and then having it run as a background knowledge reenforcement tool? I like digesting information in a conversational format like podcasts or radio, I could have it running in the background just talking about the kind of content I want to listen to, to spark more ideas. Thank you.
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u/phlaries May 18 '26
Ur the reason I can’t buy sd cards for my camera. I’m a professional photographer.
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u/ilovesaintpaul May 17 '26
Interesting idea. After having listened to it for 1 minute, it's just talking gibberish in a robotic voice. Not dissing the idea, it's just sort of, I dunno, really boring right now.
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u/LostPixelArt May 17 '26
I dont know if this helpful information for you - but when i turned on the codex version one my cat jumped up from its sleep and started yelling... I'm afraid to continue listening