James and Rose, the bizarre AI bots that were recently installed as newscasters for the local Hawaiian newspaper The Garden Island, have been removed.
Employee retention is always an issue for local newspapers, and The Garden Island newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters – usually transplants from the mainland like me – stayed for only a few years before moving on, and some worked for only a few months.
According to a representative of The Garden Island’s parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI), James and Rose joined our ranks after two months because their broadcast was interrupted. Both pairs were designed by Caledo, an Israeli company that turns articles into videos in which AI hosts 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 it intended to expand it to hundreds of other local newspapers across the country – a goal that still remains, according to a spokesman.
Although OPI declined to comment further, and Caledo deemed the show a success without discussing this specific scenario, it seems likely that the decision to end James and Rose’s tenure on The Garden Island was influenced by the overall negative public reaction.
James, a middle-aged Asian, and Rose, a younger redhead, have never been able to figure out how to present the news in a way that doesn’t alienate viewers. Their show, broadcast twice a week on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, touched on topics as diverse as autumn pumpkin distribution and worker massacre vigils – all in the same distant, matter-of-fact tone of beings incapable of understanding human emotions.
In one particularly stilted discussion about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And what impact have these free pumpkins had on the community?” to which Jacob replied, “The free pumpkins brought joy to many.”
They consistently murdered challenging Hawaiian names and even had surprising struggles with much simpler words. On their last broadcast on November 4, while discussing the air rifle championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with “judge.”
In the polarized months leading up to the election, the pair managed to inspire visceral, bipartisan disdain. Comments under the videos were almost always negative.