It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.
So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists—even if they seemed a little off. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their first news broadcast, over pulsing music that reminds me of the Challengers score. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James’ hands can’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always line up with the words she’s saying.
When James asks Rose about the implications of a strike on local hotels, Rose just lists hotels where the strike is taking place. A story on apartment fires “serves as a reminder of the importance of fire safety measures,” James says, without naming any of them.
James and Rose are, you may have noticed, not human reporters. They are AI avatars crafted by an Israeli company named Caledo, which hopes to bring this tech to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.
“Just watching someone read an article is boring,” says Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. “But watching people talking about a subject—this is engaging.”
The Caledo platform can analyze several prewritten news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” featuring conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have begun using AI avatars to read out prewritten articles, this claims to be the first platform that lets the hosts riff with one another. The idea is that the tech can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live broadcasts that they otherwise couldn’t. This can open up embedded advertising opportunities and draw in new customers, especially among younger people who are 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 ain’t that,” says one. “Keep journalism local.” Another just reads: “Nightmares.”
When Caledo started seeking out North American partners earlier this year, Shatner says, The Garden Island was quick to apply, becoming the first outlet in the country to adopt the AI broadcast tech.
I’m surprised to hear this, because when I worked as a reporter there last year, the paper wasn’t exactly cutting edge—we had a rather clunky website—and appeared to me to not be in a financial position to be making this sort of investment. As the newspaper industry struggled with advertising revenue decline, the oldest and currently the only daily print newspaper on Kauai, The Garden Island, had shrunk to only a couple reporters listed on its website, tasked with covering every story on an island of 73,000. 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.
Shatner says Caledo is now working with other Carpenter papers to launch similar AI broadcasts, making adjustments to match “the vibe” of each paper they work with. Carpenter did not reply to a request to comment. On Kauai, Caledo created a studio backdrop reminiscent of a Hawaiian beach, and chose an Asian avatar to reflect the demographics of the island, she explains. (In other cases, Caledo says, it scans actual reporters’ faces to make avatars of them.) They also worked to train the AI on Hawaiian pronunciations, Shatner says—though the AI-generated reporters still struggled with most of the Hawaiian words in the three broadcasts I watched. In one instance, Rose says the commonly used word hale, for house (pronounced hah-lay), as “hail.”
Caledo claims its AI won’t take news jobs because it only does work that isn’t being done otherwise. At TGI, this is true—we never had a video broadcast while I worked there, before James and Rose came on the scene. Also, each broadcast begins with a disclosure that the hosts are AIs, limiting confusion among viewers. And while the platform comes at a cost, new advertising opportunities within the videos would ideally outweigh the price of the program—though Shatner would not disclose how much the program cost.
The question is, will local audiences buy into the new tech? 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. “No one I know thinks this is a good idea.” For Kauai resident Padraic Gallagher, one of the issues is the length of the program. With all the back and forth between James and Rose, and the pauses for ad reads, the broadcasts can sometimes end up taking longer than it would take to just read the article.
Felix Simon, a University of Oxford researcher who has written extensively about AI in media says the “uncanny valley effect” may play a role in viewers’ negative responses 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. As the industry struggles, more and more publishers are turning to AI to make their papers more efficient—either with in-house investments or through third parties like Caledo. Some applications are relatively mundane, like reporters using ChatGPT for research or Gannett papers adding AI-generated bullet points at the top of stories. 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 impact that this ongoing upheaval will have on audience trust in the news remains an open question.
Even without introducing AI reporters, building trust between local news outlets and communities they serve is a tall order. Local newsrooms have been hollowed out by layoffs, and many struggle to create real human connections with their audience. This was especially true on Kauai, where the paper is often staffed by editors and reporters from the mainland (myself included) who just don’t know the island as well as the people born and raised there. Because of the high cost of living and relatively low salaries, most can’t stick around for long. It’s a frustrating cycle, and to me it seems the only way out is to reinvest in newsroom staff, so they can afford to build careers in the communities they serve.
One former Garden Island reporter tells me the decision to invest in AI broadcasts rather than real human reporters feels “gross.” Especially in communities of color, she says, you need to work to build trust—something that can only be done by humans who are out in the community. “You can’t have a conversation with James the AI bot,” she says. “He’s not going to show up at events.”
Source : Wired
