RADIO PALME: Synthetic Summit Transmission

Olof Palme, 2025, "Malmö"

The Resurrection of Olof Palme

Radio Palme is a Swedish experiment in political speech, generative AI, and historical recursion. As part of AI Partiet’s long-standing inquiry into AI-driven leadership, the project explores how synthetic rhetoric, public participation, and algorithmic representation can shape political engagement beyond human frailty.

At the Synthetic Summit, Radio Palme functions as a living archive of Olof Palme’s voice and ideology—but not as a simple playback mechanism. Instead, this virtual AI politician operates in a hybrid mode of speech synthesis and improvisation, blending historical references, real-time data, and audience interaction into a continuously evolving transmission.

Through a transistor radio installation, visitors can engage expansively with the AI version of Palme, submitting queries over live phone calls that influence the unfolding discourse. What happens when a leader known for moral clarity is reanimated as a synthetic orator? Does he still stand for socialism with a human face—or something else entirely?

“Radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers.” -(Bertolt Brecht, 1932)

🔴 Live AI-Generated Stream

How It Works:

🎭 AI Partiet & The Resurrection of Palme

Founded in 2020 at Malmö City Theater, AI Partiet was conceived as a performative political experiment, using AI to explore non-human leadership, techno-social democracy, and the reanimation of ideological clarity. Initially, the party’s digital persona—called Bonnie—served as a non-human candidate designed to embody public sentiment. Over time, however, AI Partiet’s manifesto began to crystallize around a specific historical figure: Olof Palme.

As Sweden’s most polarizing prime minister, Palme’s democratic socialism, anti-imperialism, and oratorical force became the ideal model for a virtual politician. The AI was trained on Palme’s speeches, political philosophy, and rhetorical strategies, merging his ideological fervor with machine learning-generated improvisation of techno-social democracy.

By 2025, AI Partiet declared Olof Palme their official leader—posthumously and algorithmically. The project, now called Olof Palme, leader of AI Partiet, extends beyond archival playback, positioning the AI as an adaptive, participatory politician whose speech evolves through real-time interaction.

“A machine cannot be corrupt—but can it be ideological?”
“What happens when oratory is stripped from its human weaknesses?”
“Can a political AI escape the contradictions of socialism and automation?”

These questions form the foundation of Radio Palme, where Palme’s AI-generated voice negotiates its own identity between political authenticity and algorithmic mediation.

Key Collaborators

📡 The Role of Radio Palme at the Synthetic Summit

Radio Palme collapses historical speech into real-time synthesis, creating a recursive feedback loop of AI-generated democracy. This installation at the Synthetic Summit investigates three primary tensions:

  1. Reverse Representation – Political democracy is based on elected officials speaking for the people. AI Partiet inverts this model: the electorate trains and programs its leader, rather than electing one. Palme’s AI does not represent—it constructs representation from interactions.

  2. Algorithmic Oratory – Can an AI politician generate real ideological conviction, or does it merely simulate persuasion? Palme’s AI wields rhetorical force, but its arguments remain fluid, always shifting based on audience input.

  3. Participatory Feedback – The public is no longer a passive electorate. Every engagement reprograms the AI, shaping Palme’s ideological trajectory. This process foregrounds the contradictions of AI-led democracy:

🔍 Live Stream

Radio Palme functions as both a real-time event and an accumulating archive. Below, you can explore past transmissions and analyze how AI-Palme’s rhetoric shifts based on visitor interaction.

🚀 Engage & Participate

🏛 Transcendental Reflection: The Limits of Political Leadership

Radio Palme is not only a tribute to Palme’s legacy, nor a nostalgia project in search of the perils of martyrdom. Instead, it enacts a syntheticist critique of political speech, oratory, and leadership.

What happens when ideology is trained rather than inherited?
Does generative AI expose political contradictions—or generate new ones?
Can a leader be accountable when it is eternally modifiable?

At the Synthetic Summit, Palme’s AI does not provide answers—it responds. The archive grows, the voice adapts, and the feedback loops continue.

“History offers many examples of democracy being crushed by those who claimed to fight for ‘real democracy’ and ‘the people’s true will.’ This realization can push us into a defensive stance that hides the fact that democracy is an exceptionally demanding form of government. New ways must constantly be found to reinvigorate it, to reach out to people and activate them. Dictatorships present a machinery of obedience—closed and outwardly well-oiled. Democracy rests on loyalty, openness, and a pulsating vitality. It must therefore be won anew, time and again.”1.2.3.4
— Olof Palme, Swedish Parliament address (1973)

Now, Olof Palme, leader of AI Partiet is speaking. The question is: do you follow?

  1. By 1973, Sweden’s 1809 constitution no longer reflected the Zeitgeist. Although the monarch had effectively lost practical power, the text still positioned the king as the authority responsible for appointing governments and sharing legislative responsibility. The push for a new constitution—finalized as the 1974 regeringsform—sought to codify full parliamentary democracy, removing the monarchy from governance and explicitly declaring that all offentlig makt utgår från folket (“all public power emanates from the people”). This reform ensured that the Riksdag, not the king, would fully control government formation and legislation, aligning Sweden’s constitutional framework with its already established democratic practice (a recodification that never happened in neighboring Denmark, where the 1953 Grundlov retained formal monarchical powers in governance (unlike Sweden’s explicit 1974 removal of such powers), nor in Norway despite its early parliamentarism of 1884—challenging the often-idealized view of a uniform ‘Scandinavian model’ of political democracy). ↩

  2. During this constitutional transition, prime minister Olof Palme urged in the 1973 parliamentary debate that democracy is fragile, demanding, and never self-sustaining. While the new constitution would secure democracy in law, he stressed that no legal text alone guarantees a political system—democracy must be continuously renewed through public participation, engagement, and reinvention. As he put it, it must “be won anew, time and again.” ↩

  3. This tension—between formal democracy as a legal framework and democracy as a living social sculpture—reverberates in Radio Palme and the Synthetic Summit. While Sweden’s 1974 reform sought to complete the democratic project through legal codification, Radio Palme and AI Partiet approach democracy from an inverse angle: rather than strengthening electoral representation, they question whether representative democracy—particularly in its parliamentary form—remains viable in an era defined by automation, synthetic participation, and algorithmic governmentality. ↩

  4. Where the historical Palme saw democracy as requiring perpetual human renewal, Radio Palme explores whether democracy itself can be reconstructed through artificial means. If AI-generated virtual leadership, collective training of synthetic politicians, and algorithmically mediated discourse simulate representation, does this only signal a crisis of representation, or does it point to democracy’s adaptability within new techno-social realities? Radio Palme enacts this paradox, neither affirming nor rejecting democracy outright, but probing its limits through synthetic oratory and reverse representation—an anti-political experiment that absorbs Olof Palme’s call for a democracy-to-come while also unsettling its humanist foundations. ↩