I used to think the scariest sound in radio was dead air.

That silence when the mic is live and nothing’s coming out. Every presenter knows that feeling — the half-second of panic before your brain catches up with your mouth.

Lately, I think we’ve all been sitting in a different kind of dead air. Except this one is about AI.

Every second post on my feed is some version of the same warning: AI is coming for your job. Copywriters, designers, radio jocks, marketers — pick your profession, there’s a thread telling you it’s already over.

I don’t buy it. Not because I’m in denial, but because I’ve actually been in the room with it — every single day, for months now. And what I’ve noticed isn’t a replacement. It’s a colleague.

The Empty Chair Nobody Talks About

Here’s something nobody tells you about creative work, on-air or online: most of it happens alone.

You’re staring at a blank content calendar at 11pm. You’re rewriting the same Reel hook for the ninth time because the first eight sounded like everyone else’s. You’re the only person in the room when the idea isn’t coming, and there’s no producer to bounce it off, no co-host to riff with.

That’s the chair AI actually fills. Not the presenter’s chair. Not the strategist’s chair. The empty one. The one that was always there, just unoccupied, at 11pm, when you needed someone — anyone — to say “okay, what if we tried it this way instead.”

It doesn’t know your audience like you do. It doesn’t know that a Gulf Malayali listener at 7am wants warmth before information, or that a caption that sounds “too polished” will die in the comments. That part is still entirely yours. It always will be. But it can sit with you while you figure it out, and that changes the shape of the work.

What Actually Changed For Me

I’ll be honest about what shifted, because vague optimism helps nobody.

I stopped dreading the first draft. The blank page used to be the hardest part of any script, any caption, any pitch — now there’s always something to react to, push against, rewrite entirely. Reacting is easier than creating from nothing. That’s not cheating. That’s just how most working creatives have always operated, except now the sparring partner is available at 2am too.

I got faster at the boring 80%, which gave me back time for the interesting 20%. Nobody fell in love with radio because they wanted to format show notes or resize a graphic six ways for six platforms. The mechanical stuff shrank. The part where I actually think about what a story means, or why a moment on air matters — that part got bigger, not smaller.

And maybe the most surprising thing: I got more opinionated, not less. When something writes the first draft for you, you find out fast what you actually think, because your only job left is to disagree with it intelligently. Nothing sharpens a creative voice faster than editing something that’s almost right.

The Jobs That Actually Disappear

I won’t pretend nothing is changing. Some jobs built entirely around repetition — the ones that were really just “produce a lot of average content, fast” — those are genuinely at risk. That was always going to happen to any task machines could do at scale.

But that was never the job of the presenter who reads a room. Or the marketer who knows why one campaign feels human and another feels hollow. Or the person who can take a brand and give it a personality that makes strangers feel like regulars.

Nobody’s replacing the feel of it. The feel is the whole job now.

So What Do You Do With The Extra Chair?

You use it like you’d use any good collaborator. You bring it your half-formed ideas instead of your finished ones — that’s where it’s actually useful. You argue with it. You throw out most of what it gives you and keep the one line that unlocks the rest. You stay the one who decides what’s true about your audience, because no tool has ever sat in a studio for nine years and learned what makes a listener stay through the ad break.

The chair was always empty. Now it isn’t.

That’s not the end of anything. That’s just — finally — some company.

chichu

Freelance Digital Marketer in Alappuzha