The Curious Case of the AI News Anchor

Are all television news reporters human?

Up until this weekend, most of you probably never even got close to giving this question a second thought. Then came Friday’s shocking news from China’s Xinhua news agency.

Reportedly, Xinhua has been working with a Chinese technology company called Sogou for quite some time to develop not one, but multiple AI news anchors.

On Friday, two results of these efforts went live, which you can see examples of in our links below. According to The Guardian’s report on the subject, two digital versions of real news anchors from the Xinhua network announced that they will now be reporting the news around the clock in place of human anchors.

Given that the original source on the subject used the word “tirelessly,” to describe this plan, it is reasonable to assume that these anchors were at least partially developed to relieve the stress of the very hectic work schedule that is common to this space.

Before you conclude that the AIs will function on their own in doing so, keep in mind that human employees will still apparently have to feed data to these systems about each news item. Backing up this reported fact is a quote from one of the AIs.

“As long as I am provided with text, I can speak as a news host.”

Therefore, while this is a step toward AIs, “taking one of our jobs,” as is often feared, we have not yet reached the point where they are completely self-sufficient in this context.