The newspaper I worked for, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, always had a hard time hiring reporters. If someone left, it could be months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.
So last Thursday, I was glad to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new reporters, though they did look a little odd. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who seems unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” anchored their first newscast, over pulsing music that reminds me of the Challengers There’s something deeply off-putting about her 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 at local hotels, Rose simply lists the hotels where the strike is taking place. A story about apartment fires “serves as a reminder of the importance of fire safety measures,” James says, without naming any of them.
As you may have noticed, James and Rose are not human journalists, but artificial intelligence avatars created by an Israeli company called Caledo, which hopes to bring this technology to hundreds of local newspapers next year.
“Watching someone read an article is boring,” says Dina Shatner, who co-founded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. “But watching people talk about a topic is interesting.”
The Caledo platform can analyze several pre-written news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” that includes a conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 In Los Angeles, they have Started using AI avatars To read previously written articles, this platform claims to be the first to allow presenters to interact with each other. The idea is that technology can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live streams that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. This can open up opportunities for integrated advertising and attract new customers, especially among young people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.
The Instagram comments accompanying the broadcasts, which have garnered between 1,000 and 3,000 views each, have been pretty scathing. “This isn’t it,” says one. “Let’s keep journalism local.” Another simply says: “Nightmares.”
When Caledo began looking for partners in North America earlier this year, Shatner says, The Garden Island was quick to apply and became the first outlet in the country to adopt AI streaming technology.
I’m surprised to hear this, because when I worked as a journalist there last year, the paper wasn’t exactly cutting edge — we had a pretty clunky website — and it seemed to me that we weren’t in a financial position to make this kind of investment. As the newspaper industry struggled with declining advertising revenue, Kauai’s oldest and currently only daily print newspaper, The Garden Island, had been reduced to just a couple of journalists listed on its website, tasked with covering every story on an island of 73,000 people. Over the past few decades, the paper has been passed around among several large media conglomerates, including earlier this year when its parent company, Oahu Publications’ Black Press Media, was purchased by Carpenter Media Group, which now controls more than 100 local media outlets across North America.