Laura Slattery: ‘Everyone can be replaced’ is a toxic message in the age of AI

Ten years into his career at Newstalk, RTÉ defector Pat Kenny gave an interesting interview to the Sunday Independent last weekend in which he touched upon the subject of his, and others’, replaceability.

“In my time in RTÉ, you’d go in and try to make a case for yourself and you’d be put down. They would tell me, ‘you’re always replaceable’. That attitude prevailed among some management. So that’s why we need an agent. And also, you don’t have to blow your own trumpet.”

Indeed. Amid the post-Tubsgate backlash to the very concept of agents negotiating fees, terms, special arrangements and side hustles, it is useful to ask this question: who, working in the Irish media, would not love to have one?

No one is irreplaceable. But sometimes it’s not the same — and it never can be

—  Pat Kenny

Some dark shades-wearer to whom you can outsource your ambition, your confidence and at least some of your admin, guaranteeing that these things don’t collapse in a puddle of paralysing despair? It sounds wonderful. That Kenny’s agent, Oireachtas committees’ star Noel Kelly, is arguably proof that sometimes agents mess things up for their clients, scarcely dents the theoretical appeal.

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But it’s that “you’re always replaceable” line in Kenny’s account of his time at RTÉ that leaps out as the depressing nub of so much of the wrangling that goes on at pretty much every level of every profit-challenged media and creative business.

Near the end of the interview, Sindo journalist Niamh Horan cited the conclusion reached by Sean O’Rourke after he managed to hold on to Kenny’s listener numbers in Radio 1′s Today slot and asked Kenny if he also believed that no one is irreplaceable.

“No one is irreplaceable. But sometimes it’s not the same — and it never can be,” was Kenny’s reply.

Earlier, he had offered as cast-iron an example as it is possible to give, in an RTÉ context, of how sometimes people prove to be irreplaceable. Despite an unnamed senior executive’s alleged claims that he could cross the road from Montrose to UCD’s Belfield campus and pick up “half-a-dozen Gerry Ryans”, when Ryan died, RTÉ couldn’t replace him.

Clearly, if you were debating against the motion “no one is irreplaceable” in Irish media, a strong opening gambit would be the sudden shrinking of 2FM’s market share from 12 per cent in 2010, the year the presenter died, to less than 8 per cent the year after — a drop that then precipitated further slippage, struggle and, to be crass about it, lost advertising income.

Truisms aren’t automatically true. Sometimes they are demonstrably untrue, with the removal of even unheralded elements upsetting the alchemy of a media outlet’s relationship with its audience. And even in situations when they are largely true, enough nuance and circumstantial complexity can creep into the discussion to render lines like “you’re always replaceable” just as hollow and blustering as bids to assert otherwise.

“Nobody is irreplaceable” is one of those sardonic takedowns uttered with dagger-sharp efficiency whenever someone else is judged to be suffering from high self-esteem — as shocking as this might seem, such a surfeit of ego has been found to exist in Irish media. But it is also something people will grudgingly say about themselves, lest anyone think they have lost touch with the reality of their weak hand.

“Everyone is replaceable”, the more threatening-sounding corollary, meanwhile, is not something anyone wants to hear from their employer, ever.

Controllers of purse strings in media organisations don’t usually whittle down exorbitant pay at the top because they have grown abruptly keen on narrowing the inequality gap between the ‘stars’ and their exhausted, rank-and-file colleagues

It is less about modesty, false or otherwise, and more about establishing a premise for the suppression of employees’ worth. At best, it is a tactical lack of appreciation. At worst, it is a prelude to poor treatment by executives whose replaceability — as the recent history of RTÉ has shown — is equally obvious, if not more so.

For sure, it feels odd to take issue with the idea that no one is irreplaceable with reference to RTÉ, which probably should have and could have run with that idea a great deal more in its negotiations with individual presenters, and not just because licence-fee payers were on the hook. Often it is the platform that bestows commercial value, not the personality. Not everybody, to be frank, is Gerry Ryan.

Alas, controllers of purse strings in media organisations don’t usually whittle down exorbitant pay at the top because they have grown abruptly keen on narrowing the inequality gap between the “stars” and their exhausted, rank-and-file colleagues.

They generally do so because they are on a campaign to shave money off their entire operating cost base and they have to start somewhere. In such crisis environments, the short-term benefits of marginal reductions in overheads soon outweigh the risk of triggering irrecoverable losses of revenue.

“Everyone is replaceable” stops being a convenient bedrock of negotiation and mutates into a necessary article of faith. The next phase, I regret to say, involves actual replacing.

In this next science fiction-tinged iteration of industrial relations, ‘everyone is replaceable’ becomes ‘you have been replaced’

Across the international media industry, companies are openly declaring plans to jettison swathes of human staff and use generative artificial intelligence in their stead. Music labels, on the basis that robots don’t tend to complain about royalty rates, are exploring how to monetise AI voice tools. Most starkly, Hollywood’s desperation to replace the talents of humans with agent-unencumbered AI is so acute, it has contributed to a remarkable double writers-actors strike that may well break records before it’s over.

In this next science fiction-tinged iteration of industrial relations, “everyone is replaceable” becomes “you have been replaced”.

It’s a trend that will, if allowed to continue unabated, treat us all to a cheap sludge of content-farmed mediocrity so dull, vast and fake, it will make us long for the days when “nobody is irreplaceable” was less often a collectively applied corporate strategy that it was something people said to be self-effacing and wry.