James and Rose, the strange AI bots recently installed as news broadcasters for Hawaii’s local newspaper Garden Island, have ended.
Employee retention has always been an issue for local newspapers, and Garden Island Newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters, most of them immigrants from the mainland like me, worked there for just a few years before moving on to the next world, some lasting only a few months.
According to a representative from Garden Island’s parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI), James and Rose has joined us as the show was canceled after two months on the air. The pair was designed by Caledo, an Israeli company that turns articles into videos in which AI hosts discuss news with each other. The Garden Island program was the first of its kind in the U.S., and Kaledo said at the time that it intended to expand it to hundreds of other local newspapers across the country, but a spokesperson said this was now the first of its kind. But it is a goal.
OPI declined to comment further, and Mr. Khaled declared the program a success without elaborating on this particular scenario, but the likely widespread negative public reaction is likely to be due to Mr. James and Mr. Rose’s garden. He is believed to have influenced the decision to end his tenure on the Island.
James, a middle-aged Asian man, and Rose, a young redhead, could never figure out how to deliver the news in a way that didn’t offend their audience. Their twice-weekly shows on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram covered a variety of topics, from fall pumpkin giveaways to worker massacre vigils, all of which were equally incomprehensible. He dealt with the distant facts of humanity in a matter-of-fact tone. human emotions.
During a particularly formal exchange regarding the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “What impact did the free pumpkins have on the community?” James replied, “Free pumpkins brought joy to many.”
They consistently crushed difficult Hawaiian names and even had a surprising amount of trouble with simple words. In his final broadcast on November 4, while discussing the Air Rifle Championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with the word “referee.”
In the polarizing months leading up to the election, the pair managed to evoke visceral contempt across party lines. The comments under the video were almost universally negative.
