The newspaper I used to work for, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, always seemed to have a demanding time hiring reporters. If someone left, it might be months before we hired someone to replace them, if we did at all.
So last Thursday I was pleased to see that the paper had apparently hired two recent reporters—even if they were a little odd. In a roomy studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who apparently can’t blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who has trouble pronouncing words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their first newscast to the pulsating music that reminded me of The contenders result. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James’s hands can’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always match the words she says.
When James asks Rose about the effects of the strike on local hotels, Rose simply lists the hotels where the strike is taking place. The story about the apartment fires “serves as a reminder of the importance of fire safety measures,” James says, without naming any of them.
James and Rose, as you may have noticed, are not human reporters. They are AI avatars created by an Israeli company called Caledo, which hopes to bring the technology to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.
“Just watching someone read an article is boring,” says Dina Shatner, who founded Caledo with her husband, Moti, in 2023. “But watching people talk about a topic—that’s engaging.”
Caledo’s platform can parse a bunch of pre-written news articles and turn them into a “live stream” of conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, they have AI avatars started to be used to read previously written articles, says it’s the first platform that lets hosts bounce ideas off each other. The idea is that the technology could give miniature local newsrooms the ability to create live broadcasts they otherwise couldn’t. That could open up opportunities for embedded ads and attract recent customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.
The Instagram comments under the streams, each of which has garnered between 1,000 and 3,000 views, have been pretty damning. “This is not it,” says one. “Keep your journalism local.” Another simply reads: “Nightmares.”
When Caledo began looking for partners in North America earlier this year, The Garden Island quickly signed on and became the first location in the country to deploy the AI-powered broadcast technology, Shatner says.
I’m surprised to hear that, because when I was a reporter 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 that kind of investment. As the newspaper industry grappled with degenerating advertising revenues, Kauai’s oldest and currently only daily print newspaper, The Garden Island, has dwindled to just a handful of reporters listed on its website, tasked with covering every story on the island of 73,000. In recent decades, the paper has been shuffled between several major 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 outlets across North America.