Followers of the legacy Kauaʻi newspaper The Garden Island were recently introduced to “Rose” and “James,” the newsroom's newest hires.
The artificial intelligence broadcasters read stories in videos posted on the newspaper's online platforms, including YouTube.
"They don't sound or look human. There's an uncanny valley effect that's going to keep you at a distance from them, and the information you're getting from them is not enough and is more efficiently consumed in other ways," said technology journalist Matthew Gault.
Gault wrote a story for the website 404 Media about the AI newscasters — and Caledo, the Israeli company that created “Rose” and “James.”
"It's notable because it's the first time that I've seen it in the U.S., and it's also a small local paper," Gault said. "What they're doing, really, is just kind of reading ChatGPT summaries of what the four journalists have fed into the machine."
He said these types of avatars are typically created using what's called a generative adversarial network, a machine learning process also used for large language models and image generators.
"There's a large database of pictures of humans, and a computer kind of slaps all this stuff together and creates what I would call an amalgamation of all of those different people," Gault said.
Some of Gault's big questions were, "How do you know that this thing's not hallucinating?" and "What are the guardrails?"
"Just based on the outputs, like what they're saying and the stories that I have seen on the website, Caledo has some sort of proprietary LLM that is similar to ChatGPT, that is generating the script based on what is being written in those articles. A lot of the stuff is word for word. It does miss things, though," Gault said, using the initialism for large language model.
He said artificial intelligence technology is too tantalizing for companies looking to reduce their bottom lines by cutting labor costs.
"We're going to have to go through the corporations trying to make this work for a while before it kind of all falls apart," he said. "Unfortunately, more people are going to lose their jobs, more journalists are going to lose their jobs, and there's going to be more stuff like this."
Longs Drugs, which has a sponsorship agreement with The Garden Island's owner, Oahu Publications Inc., said it was unaware that its logo was being used in the videos.
In a statement provided to HPR, the union group for Honolulu Star-Advertiser workers commented on its parent company's new exploits in AI. The union said that two Star-Advertiser reporters raised concerns about the program after a demonstration of the technology.
“We think there is a place for AI in the newsroom,” the group said, in part. “This feels like a step backward in maintaining trust. We think it’s unlikely the community will embrace James or Rose as kama’āina.”
This interview aired on The Conversation on Sept. 16, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
