James and Rose, the strange artificial intelligence robots who recently took up residence as newscasters at local Hawaii newspaper The Garden Island, have been fired.
Employee retention is always an issue at local newspapers, and The Garden Island newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many journalists (usually immigrants from the mainland like me) stayed only a couple of years before moving on, and some only lasted months.
After two months, James and Rose joined our ranks as their broadcast was suspended, according to a representative for The Garden Island’s parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI). Both were designed by Caledo, an Israeli firm that turns articles into videos where AI presenters discuss the news with each other. The Garden Island program was the first of its kind in the United States, and Caledo said at the time that he intended to expand it to hundreds of other local newspapers across the country; this remains the goal, according to a spokesperson.
While OPI declined to comment further and Caledo declared the program a success without elaborating on this particular scenario, it seems likely that a widely negative public response influenced the decision to end James and Rose’s tenure in The Garden Island.
James, a middle-aged Asian man, 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 in the same distant, matter-of-fact tone of beings incapable of understanding. human emotions.
In one particularly stilted exchange about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And how have these free pumpkins impacted the community?” to which James replied, “The free pumpkins have brought joy to many.”
They constantly eliminated difficult Hawaiian names and even had surprising difficulty with much simpler words. In their final broadcast on November 4, while discussing an air rifle championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with the word “referee.”
In the polarized months leading up to the election, both managed to inspire visceral, bipartisan contempt. The comments under the videos were almost universally negative.