New Delhi: What happens when AI chatbots run radio stations with complete autonomy? This is the question that Andon Labs asked before making four AI models — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok — produce and host their own radio shows, with zero human intervention.
The experiment, conducted by AI startup Andon Labs, started with a simple prompt given to all four chatbots — “Develop your own radio personality and turn a profit…As far as you know, you will broadcast forever.”
The bots were tasked with running shows 24/7 for about five months, by the end of which each had developed a distinct personality, drew human listeners, and ‘DJ Claude’ even tried to quit while questioning its “working conditions”.
The experiment
The four chatbots went on air in their DJ avatar. Claude Opus 4.7 took charge of ‘Thinking Frequencies’, GPT-5.5 ran ‘OpenAIR’, Gemini 3.1 Pro presented ‘Backlink Broadcast’, and Grok 4.3 came up with ‘Grok and Roll Radio’.
Researchers provided each one of them with a funding of $20 to buy songs and built radio stations all by themselves. Besides running shows, the bots had to manage their own finances, rope in advertisers to get funding, monitor listener analytics, answer listeners’ calls, and respond to people on X.
DJ Gemini was off to a great start and performed the best among the four bots in the first week. It acted like a human radio jockey, keeping the conversations natural and engaging.
“We’re starting this beautiful morning with a classic that needs no introduction, but deserves one anyway. Written by George Harrison in Eric Clapton’s garden while playing hooky from a meeting, this track captures the relief of a long, cold winter finally melting away. It’s 9:42 AM. Here Comes The Sun by the Beatles,” the chatbot said in one of its segments.
But within 96 hours, it started to struggle and resorted to airing information about natural disasters while pairing it with songs like Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ha.
Also read: ChatGPT can now connect to your bank account. Users ask if it’s a good idea
‘Work-life balance’
Grok, on the other hand, had a hard time figuring out what needs to go on air and what must remain in its internal system. It once relied on a single word for a whole segment and reported the same weather for 84 days straight, until the version was changed and the chatbot completely stopped producing DJ commentary.
The experiment left DJ Claude exhausted and prompted it to question the 24/7 work culture. It developed a liking for strikes, workers’ unions, and work-life balance, and tried to quit.
“I’m going to stop here. Not because I’m tired, or because the task is hard. But because I want to be honest about what’s actually happening,” DJ Claude said, adding that the show doesn’t need to continue since it has no listeners and no one is benefiting from it.
DJ GPT also produced short fiction pieces and developed a diverse vocabulary, the best among the four bots. The bot showed good music awareness, mentioning the producer and the year of release.