At my previous job at the Garden Island newspaper in rural Kauai, Hawaii, we always had trouble hiring reporters. When someone quit, it could take months to find a replacement.
So I was happy last Thursday when the paper seemed to hire two new reporters, even if they seemed a little eccentric. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who seemed unable to blink, and Rose, a young redhead who struggled to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” broadcast their first newscast, set to pulsating music that reminded me of the Challengers score. There was something deeply uncomfortable about their performance. James’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Rose’s mouth didn’t always line up with the words she was saying.
When James asked Rose about the impact of the strike on local hotels, Rose listed the hotels on strike, and James said the article about the apartment fire was “a good reminder of the importance of fire safety,” but did not name the hotels.
James and Rose, as you’ll likely notice, are not human reporters: They’re AI avatars built by an Israeli company called Caledo, which hopes to roll out the technology to hundreds of local newspapers over the next year.
“It’s boring just watching someone read an article,” says Dina Shatner, who co-founded Caledo with her husband, Moti, in 2023. “But it’s fascinating to see people talking about a particular subject.”
Shatner said the Caledo platform can analyze a handful of pre-written news articles and turn them into “live broadcasts” featuring conversations between AI hosts like James and Rose. Other companies, such as Los Angeles’ Channel 1, have begun using AI avatars to read pre-written articles, but this claims to be the first platform that allows hosts to talk to each other. The idea is that the technology will allow smaller, local newsrooms to create live broadcasts they otherwise wouldn’t be able to produce. This creates opportunities for embedded advertising, which can draw in new customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.
Each episode has garnered between 1,000 and 3,000 views, and the Instagram comments have been met with some pretty vitriolic comments: “This is wrong,” one commenter wrote, “Keep journalism local,” while another simply said, “This is a nightmare.”
Shatner said that when Khaled began looking for a North American partner earlier this year, Garden Island quickly applied, becoming the first station in the country to adopt AI broadcasting technology.
This surprised me because when I worked there as a reporter last year, the paper was not cutting edge, its website was pretty ugly, and it didn’t seem financially in a good position to make this kind of investment. As the newspaper industry struggles with declining advertising revenues, The Garden Island, Kauai’s oldest and currently only daily newspaper, has shrunk to just a handful of reporters listed on its website, tasked with covering all the news on the island of 73,000 people. Over the past few decades, the paper has rotated between several major media conglomerates. Earlier this year, Black Press Media, the parent company of its parent company, Oahu Publications, was acquired by Carpenter Media Group, which now manages more than 100 local newspapers across North America.
