The Garden Island on the remote Pacific island of Kauai, where I used to work, always seemed to have trouble hiring investigators. If one left, it may take weeks before we hired a substitute, if we ever did.
But, last Thursday, I was glad to see that the document appeared to possess hired two fresh journalists—even if they seemed a little off. In a large theater overlooking a tropical shore, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to smile, and Rose, a younger blond who struggles to spell words like” Hanalei” and” TV”, presented their first media spread, over pulsing song that reminds me of the Challengers rating. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James ‘ hands ca n’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth does n’t always line up with the words she’s saying.
Rose only lists the hotels where the attack is taking place when James inquires about the effects of a strike on nearby hotels. Without naming any of them, James claims that a tale about room fires” serves as a reminder of the importance of fire protection steps.”
James and Rose are, you may have noticed, no mortal writers. They are AI images created by an Israeli firm called Caledo, which hopes to publish this technology in lots of local newspapers over the upcoming year.
” Only watching people read an article is boring”, says Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her father Moti in 2023. ” But watching folks talking about a subject—this is engaging”.
According to Shatner, the Caledo software can analyze various prewritten information articles and change them into a “live spread” featuring conversation between Artificial hosts like James and Rose. While other firms, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have begun using AI characters to read out prewritten content, this claims to be the first program that lets the guests rhythm with one another. The technology aims to enable small, neighborhood newsrooms to produce live broadcasts that they otherwise could n’t. This opens up opportunities for embedded advertising and can entice more recent customers, particularly those who are younger and more likely to watch videos than read articles.
Instagram comments under the broadcasts, which have each garnered between 1, 000 and 3, 000 views, have been pretty scathing. ” This ai n’t that”, says one. ” Keep journalism local”. Another just reads:” Nightmares”.
According to Shatner, The Garden Island was the first outlet in the nation to adopt AI broadcast technology when Caledo began looking for North American partners earlier this year.
I’m surprised to learn this because when I worked there last year, the paper was n’t particularly cutting edge; our website was rather dated, and it seemed to me that I was n’t in a financial position to be investing in this sort of material. The Garden Island, the oldest and the only daily print newspaper on Kauai, had shrunk to just a few reporters listed on its website, tasked with covering every story on an island of 73, 000. As the newspaper industry struggled with advertising revenue decline, the island’s oldest and current island’s economy. In recent decades, the paper has been passed around between several large media conglomerates—including earlier this year, when its parent company Oahu Publications ‘ parent company, Black Press Media, was purchased by Carpenter Media Group, which now controls more than 100 local outlets throughout North America.
Caledo claims that its AI wo n’t accept news jobs because it only performs tasks that are n’t currently being performed. At TGI, this is true—we never had a video broadcast while I worked there, before James and Rose came on the scene. Additionally, each broadcast begins with the disclosure that the hosts are AIs, which helps to avoid confusion among viewers. Even though the platform has a price, the cost of the program should ideally outweigh any new advertising opportunities in the videos, even though Shatner would not say how much the program would cost.
Will local audiences be drawn to the new technology? Early returns suggest that Kauai viewers, at least, might have trouble accepting James and Rose as kama’aina ( locals ). ” It’s creepy”, one local woman, who asked to remain anonymous, tells me. Nobody I know believes that is a wise decision. For Kauai resident Padraic Gallagher, one of the issues is the length of the program. The broadcasts can sometimes end up taking longer than it would take to read the article due to all the back and forth between James and Rose and the pauses for ad reads.
Felix Simon, a University of Oxford researcher who has written extensively about AI in the media, speculates that the “uncanny valley effect” may be responsible for viewers ‘ negative reactions to the AIs. Also, he says, people can come to trust local news broadcasters who become the” face of the news” for them. ” It’s a personal bond, and the thought that this gets replaced with something machine-generated will likely sit uneasy with some”, says Simon.
It seems that AI is coming for our newspapers, whether readers want it or not. More and more publishers are turning to AI to improve the efficiency of their publications as the industry struggles, either through in-house investments or through outside companies like Caledo. Some applications are merely ad-hoc, like Gannett papers adding AI-generated bullet points at the top of their stories or reporters using ChatGPT for research. In other instances, entire articles are being written and published without human involvement. In certain cases, like at Gizmodo, the addition of AI has reportedly been used as justification for further layoffs. The effect that this ongoing upheaval will have on the trust of viewers in the news is still a mystery.
Building trust between the local news organizations and the communities they serve is a difficult task even without the introduction of AI reporters. Local newsrooms have been squandered by job losses, and many struggle to connect with their audience in real life. This was especially true on Kauai, where the paper is frequently staffed by mainland reporters and editors ( including myself ), who simply do n’t know the island as well as the people who were born and raised there. Most people ca n’t stay for long because of the high cost of living and low salaries. It seems like the only way out of this frustrating cycle is to reinvest in newsroom staff so they can afford to pursue careers in the communities they serve.
One former Garden Island reporter claims that it feels “gross” to choose to invest in AI broadcasts over real human reporters. She claims that especially in communities of color, you need to work to foster trust, something that can only be done by people who are not in the community. ” You ca n’t have a conversation with James the AI bot”, she says. ” He’s not going to show up at events”.
