Only 42% people trust real-person announcers. What will happen if AI is used to report news?
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A startup is developing a AI news service broadcast by presenter, will this upend the decades-old relationship between television viewers and on-screen anchors?
These shots would not be out of place on many news channels around the world.
A video posted on social media showed that over the course of 22 minutes, a variety of highly polished news anchors stood in front of cameras and delivered the day's news. But none of them are real, but generated by AI.
The video was produced by Channel 1, a Los Angeles-based company founded by entrepreneurs Adam Mosam and Scott Zabielski.They plan to launch AI-generated news on streaming TV channels later this year.
“There seems to be an interesting opportunity to improve the news user experience by using AI to tailor content to individuals,” Mosam said.
AI technology can also translate scripts and interviews from one language to another, Channel 1 showed off these features in a promotional video shared in December.
Channel 1 is the latest demonstration of AI news presenters around the world. In Kuwait, an AI character named “Fedha” reports headlines for Kuwait News.
In May 2023, the Greek national broadcaster ERT will use the AI-generated deep virtual human Hermes to conduct news releases; South Korea's SBS Broadcasting Company will hand over five months of news broadcasting work to the AI-generated character Zae-In this year; India and Taiwan also have Similar applications.
But one key question remains to be answered:Will viewers trust news delivered by AI instead of humans??
Trust in newscasters has reached an all-time low, according to a survey by polling firm Ipsos.
Only 42% people in the UK trust TV newscasters, a drop of 16 percentage points in one year. Doubting newscasters as independent arbiters of truth is an unusual modern phenomenon, with many people choosing to get their news from individual creators or online bloggers.
These connections between social media influencers and their audiences are known as "parasitic social influence".
Parasitic social relationships were first proposed by scholars at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. It is defined as: viewers watching the evening news program believe that the anchor standing behind the desk is talking directly to them through the camera. News anchors are no longer just reporters delivering the news, but friends to their viewers, spending time with them in their living rooms every night.
Influential social media influencers have also adopted this direct-to-camera format and connected with their audiences through charisma, with great success.
“It’s interesting that the label ‘parasitic society’ has evolved from describing an individual’s affinity for remote news anchors to something much broader,” said Christine H Tran, who studies digital platforms and labor at the University of Toronto.
“You can have a parasitic social relationship with a journalist or a news Twitch streamer, but you can also have a parasitic social relationship with a YouTube star, a singer, or a couple on Instagram.”
But whether AI can replicate personal connections is less certain. Mosam admits: “You will never have the same connection with an AI as you do with another human being.”
However, Mosam also said: "We are not developing AI news reporting services because we think robots can do a better job than humans. This is ridiculous."
The idea that journalists don't read the news is not unusual, even the idea that the news is computer-generated.
Nic Newman, a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for Journalism at the University of Oxford and a former editor at the BBC, said: "When I first started working in journalism, the news was delivered by actors, and people were quite accepting of that."
Newman believes that journalists don't always read the news, which means the experiment is likely to be successful. But it also has limitations and is only useful for short news briefings.
But Newman also said he's not sure viewers will accept a relationship with an AI anchor. After all, for news programs,Humanity still matters.
This is something Tran is unsure about. "If broadcasts of AI characters were accurately labeled 'AI content,' and viewers knew they had no personal lives outside of the screen, would they inspire the same parasitic sociality?"
“It depends on whether the platform hosting the AI moderator will label their content as AI, as some platforms such as Instagram have considered.”
Channel 1 and NewsGPT claim to be the world’s first entirely AI-generated news channel, but perhaps there’s another question that needs to be answered:Is it possible to completely eliminate human involvement??
Currently, Channel has nearly a dozen staff members who review AI-generated scripts and select which stories should be reported.
Mosam said Channel 1 goes through 13 steps before each story is broadcast to ensure that some issues related to AI generation are not aired. These include "pseudo-facts," in which AI tools make things up, which is an obvious no-no in journalism. The company behind it is preparing to hire an editor-in-chief early next year.
Being able to actually find newsworthy events and report on them is another difficulty AI may face, according to Mosam and Newman.Channel 1's test program relies heavily on stories unearthed and footage captured by human journalists.
"If you don't have these sources, or if these sources are cut off, I really can't think of how AI can find newsworthy events. If you don't have these raw materials, then AI has no way to start," Newman said.
Mosam believes: “Certain elements of the reporting process can be completed by AI, but other elements cannot be achieved. "
"You can never effectively gather intelligence from person to person or conduct effective interviews from person to person," he said. "But I can fly a drone and analyze everything I see."
News gathering entirely by AI, with no human involvement, is not part of Channel 1's current plans.
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