James and Rose, the strange artificial intelligence robots recently installed as newscasters at local Hawaiian newspaper Garden Islandhave been fired.
Employee retention is always an issue at local newspapers, and Garden Islandfrom the Hawaiian island of Kauai, is no exception. Many reporters (usually transplants from the continent like me) stayed a couple of years before changing jobs, and some only lasted months.
Fired after two months
After two months, James and Rose have joined our ranks, since their broadcast has been interrupted, according to a representative of the parent company of Garden IslandOahu Publications (OPI). The pair was designed by Caledo, an Israeli company that turns articles into videos in which AI presenters discuss the news with each other. The program Garden Island It was the first of its kind in the United States, and Caledo indicated at the time that he intended to expand it to hundreds of local newspapers throughout the country; this remains the goal, according to a spokesperson.
Although OPI declined to comment further and Caledo declared the show a success without going into details, it seems likely that negative public response influenced the decision to end James and Rose’s tenure in Garden Island.
Without emotions
James, a middle-aged Asian, and Rose, a younger redhead, never knew how to present the news in a way that wasn’t deeply unpleasant to viewers. His show, which aired twice a week on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, covered topics as varied as a fall pumpkin giveaway and a vigil for a workplace massacre, all with the same distant, matter-of-fact tone of beings incapable of understanding the human emotions.
In one particularly stilted exchange about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And how have these free pumpkins affected the community?” to which James responded, “The free pumpkins have brought joy to many.”
They often got difficult Hawaiian names wrong and even had trouble with much simpler words. In his last broadcast, on November 4, while discussing an air rifle championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with the word “referee“.
In the polarized months before the election, the couple managed to inspire visceral, bipartisan contempt. The comments under the videos were almost universally negative.
“This is scary,” prayed one comment on Facebook The Maui Newsanother local Hawaii newspaper. The Hawaiian Nonprofit Journalism Media Honolulu Civil Beat used them as a fundraising hook: “You no longer have to imagine a world where local news and information is generated by an algorithm,” Ben Nishimoto, Civil Beat’s vice president of operations and philanthropy, wrote in an email to September, referring to the broadcast: “That dystopia is already here. And it’s terrifying.”
terrifying dystopia
I don’t like to take on my fellow journalists, but I admit I was also glad they left. Although James and Rose did not actively supplant any existing jobs in the newsroom, I was concerned that the effort would divert resources that could be spent on traditional media expenses, such as human reporters, photographers and editors.
For most of the time I worked there, I was one of only two reporters covering an island of 73,000 people. The newspaper was acquired earlier this year by conglomerate Carpenter Media Group, which controls more than 100 local media outlets in North America.
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