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China's AI news anchors

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51–60 of 115 posts

Re: China's AI news anchors

#51

China's track record with free speech makes the implications of completely bypassing any human 'journalist' kind of scary. I guess it's always been possible, but damn.

If it gets cheap enough, it will likely happen elsewhere. Onscreen talent is an expense that a lot of media companies would probably happily get rid of. It doesn't mean the reporters go away, but a universally and perpetually attractive, easily changeable, contract-free and salary-free anchor would be a bonus for any news company.

It could even spark new industry as companies arise to create avatars for other public-facing entities where a real person is not required, like corporate PR spokespersons.

Hollywood has already started down this road by creating virtual stand-ins for deceased actors - there's no reason to consider that they won't just create one from the whole cloth within a few years.

It might not happen, but don't be surprised if it does.

Re: China's AI news anchors

#53
post #50

Reminder that one chief editor of the People's daily commited suicide days ago, following several similar suicides. A stressful job even to read propaganda afterall.

> Reminder that one chief editor of the People's daily commited suicide days ago, following several similar suicides. > A stressful job even to read propaganda afterall. Yeah, I've been told these news anchors are expected to not make a single mistake in their speech or presentation during the broadcasts, and that they're timed so precisely that you could set your watch by them.

Another dangerous job we can protect humans from!

Re: China's AI news anchors

#54
post #37
post #28

I happen to think that how people react to news is determined to quite a large extent by the anchor's delivery. Stress and and intonation give clues about interpretation and expected response. Eg BBC newsreaders in the 1970s delivered in a very flat and non-opinionated style. Today it's full of their own "personality", ie opinion. Worrying therefore that such stuff may be just a few config variables away from being c…

Lets take it a step further. Your news feed will know who is watching it, will have a loads of data on your interests, beliefs and opinions and will cater the same news event specifically optimized for your consumption. Instead of having a handful of news organizations which have obvious biases one way or another to attract that particular audience, we'll have a unique experience for every individual. I'm actually a…

And another step? - one suggested in 1968 in John Brunner's 'Stand on Zanzibar' [0] which has the viewers inserted into the very programmes they are themselves watching. Truly an awesome book, and still amazingly fresh today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar

Re: China's AI news anchors

#56
The idea of a virtual anchor was pioneered >10 years ago by a group at the Northwestern CS Department including Kris Hammond. The project was called "News at Seven." This video shows the later iterations of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3MRkFYM9Q4

IIRC the early version around 2005 or 2006 used the Half Life 2 engine, so you would have Alyx Vance reading the news with a gun strapped to her belt. At the time I remember thinking that this would be great when the customization options were enabled, as you could just get the news you want instead of the stuff you don't care about that takes up most newscasts today, as well as preferred visual and voice skins to handle the narration.

As someone who worked in broadcast news, I can say that most anchors do nothing more than reading from a script so this type of task is perfectly suited to replacement by a bot or AI or whatever you want to call it. Where it fails is the "banter" format that many U.S. local newscasts use and the ad hoc interviews that local and national anchors conduct with reporters in the field.

Re: China's AI news anchors

#57
post #30

Wow text-to-speech doesn't seem to have gotten very far in the last 20 years? When we were kids we used to use a windows (3.1?) program for prank calls and it didn't sound much worse.. I would have thought by now basic things like word spacing and tones would have improved to the point where you would only realise its artificial occasionally.

It definitely doesn't use state of the art TTS. It sounds similar to MBrola english voice. There is google's [Wavenet](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...) and even chinese Baidus [Clarinet](https://clarinet-demo.github.io/) which are much better.

Re: China's AI news anchors

#59
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please try to not be so polemic and disagreeable in your posts, and instead bring a spirit of respect here. Pointing out the crimes of the PRC is not disrespectful. Except, perhaps, to the PRC. > Chinese people are human beings. Nobody's saying they're not.

> Except, perhaps, to the PRC. or people who has been unwittingly duped/brainwashed into buying that "China will overtake USA anytime now" propaganda. it's not limited to race, I've definitely seen some white American dude shilling for China...smh

Maybe you're so bought into an "us vs them" mentality that you equated fair-mindedness with "shilling".
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