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