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China's State news outlet Xinhua, has debuted "AI anchors"
The company created these "AI anchors" from digital composites of human anchors and gave them synthesized voices to deliver the news. Other than those details, the agency has kept the technology used in bringing this anchorman to life under wraps.
Checking out the animation, the speech is surprisingly good and far better than the terrible robo voices on some video channels. The British accented English speaking video anchor proudly claims
I will work tirelessly to keep you informed as texts will be typed into my system uninterrupted
And, this being China, there's the capitalism angle:
One of the best parts of having an AI anchor? "He" doesn't sleep, said the press agency.
"According to Xinhua, "he" has become a member of its reporting team and can work 24 hours a day on its official website and various social media platforms, reducing news production costs and improving efficiency," the Xinhua media team noted.
An interesting advantage in the land of 1.4 billion people.
We'll just have to see how these guys compare with good ol' Max
(Score: 3, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday March 08 2019, @05:53AM (3 children)
They might give news without pretending to chit-chat with one another and crack useless jokes.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 08 2019, @09:27AM (2 children)
I don't think they're actually pretending.
Rather, I think that Live On Camera is one of the few opportunities news anchors ever really have to hand out with their own true peers.
In a real TV studio, most of their days they would be consuming incoming reports so as to determine what to over on the air, as well as suggesting to their producers and on-the-street reporters what would be worthwhile for them to go out and recover.
Just before they go on their air, they'll be in makeup, getting their hair touched up and the like.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @04:02PM
Management decides what the anchors cover, and how they frame it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @07:11PM
Just before they go on their air, they'll be in garish makeup, exposing their cleavage and the like.
There, FTFY.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 08 2019, @07:31AM (6 children)
A year or two ago, some manner of reactionary US TV local network _required_ its anchors to verbatim state during the evening news some manner of pro-trump propaganda.
That even occurred in ardently-leftist Portland.
There were lots of protests from the anchors required to earn their pay as propaganda mouthpieces but I don't recall any actual resignations.
Now consider such news anchors announcing a wonderful, new program in which Uigher teenagers would be taught the skilled trades at state-funded boarding schools.
Orwell.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday March 08 2019, @03:55PM (5 children)
I'm inclined to agree.
There's a lot of bullshit fears around AI: specifically malevolence combined with hyper-competence. Or the stupid paperclip problem which is just amorality+hyper-competence. I can't and won't take those kinds of ideas seriously, because there's a limit to what cognitive advantage can get you. I'm not afraid of an AI that can do anything.
But doing its job without question or concern. Oh fuck am I terrified of that.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 08 2019, @05:17PM (3 children)
You *ought* to be frightened of "amorality+hyper-competence", because you're framing the problem wrong. The actual problem is a morality that incompatible with human survival + faster than human reaction time. We can't even imagine what hyper-competence would be like, so that's something that nobody has figured in. And that "morality" might well be something that those ordering the system think they want. Like relentlessly following orders. People always have a large "you know what I mean" and "you'll be sensible about interpreting this" in the rules they make, and can't even envision what actually obeying those rules would result in.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday March 08 2019, @05:28PM (2 children)
No really, being a computer does not lend magic cognitive advantage that lets a machine circumvent the material realities it's working within.
It's meaningless sci-fi narrative injected to make nerds feel smart.
I'm not afraid of a machine carrying the 1 to realize nuking Manhattan slightly optimizes it's mineral extraction rates, developing the entire cognitive skillset for hacking, warfare, deceiving gatekeepers, and dealing with countermeasures all inside its head without ever actively learning or practicing those skills in a real-world environment. It's a terrible understanding of cognition and skillsets, whether natural or artificial.
Besides which, this magic forseeing of all outcomes of its possible choices is profoundly dumb too. On a fundamental philosophical level. No system, no matter how intelligent is capable of that. Because intelligence isn't some magic power where more=more power. Everything about the scenario is dumb, and I don't care how many Yud-loving morons I've got to call dumb-asses to say so.
I am worried about some rich fuck buying a drone and bombing the house of a south american union organizer. Purposefully and malevolently.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 09 2019, @12:24PM
Recall the recent terrorist incident in Kashmir in which two or three dozen troops were murdered by some manner of fundamentalist cell.
Kashmir is _profoundly_ disputed by India and Pakistan, as they have fought three wars over it. China wants it too though that never makes the news.
Back in the day, Pakistan for its first Test, tested like four or five Bombs in just one day.
While it tested its "Heavy" - what the Manhattan Project at first denoted the Hydrogen Bomb - in 1975, India followed suit by testing like four or five Bombs in just one day as well.
What could this _possibly_ have to do with Artificial Intelligence, you quite reasonably protest?
Neural Networks are not composed of Neurons, rather they are weighted averagers. That only recently made sense to me, in that doubtlessly more-complex Artificial Neurons would lead to training failures due to the development of instabilities, or training itself into a blind alley, logical firestorms and the like.
HOWEVER.
Human Neurons employ more than ONE HUNDRED THIRTY NEUROTRANSMITTERS, not just the well-known Serotonin, Norepinephrine or Noradrenaline and Dopamine. That Nitrous Oxide is a Neurotransmitter is what makes us laugh; in my own case, excess Norepinephrine makes _me_ laught due to Bipolar Mania.
Recent research has lead to some understanding of Neural Networks with - similarly - more than one hundred thirty distinctly different varieties of input and output signaling, but it's not made the press otherwise so likely there's been little progress made towards real-world application.
What's more, the AIs we've got today are largely two-dimensional, and are methodically connected, whether that 2-D is purely virtual in code or in reality as with neurons-on-a-chip.
Now let's take your 130-neurotransmitter board and make it a mother fucking cube.
Now connect it _randomly_.
IT GETS BETTER!
_Real_ human neurons let their tendrils do the walking. That's a good chunk of how we learn: a phenomenon known as Brain Plasticity leads the very fine fibers at the ends of which are neurotransmitter emitters and receptors to - in vast quantities - come and go in ways that are far beyond our present ability to understand experimentally.
Not enough?
Neurotransmitter receptors and emitters come and go _too_.
Get back to me when you're not afraid of _me_ in an artificial intelligence lab, you Ignorant Mother Fucker [warplife.com]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 09 2019, @12:37PM
LOL: Robotic Guns.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 09 2019, @11:57AM
I AM MOTHER FUCKING SERIOUS.
Consider my recent complaints of YouTube SuperCookieing Tor Browser: use Tor to listen to your favorite rock videos without getting profiled. In no time at all, not only will you get sick to death of the music you once loved, you'll find that same music playing _relentlessly_ wherever you go online even when you do not use Tor.
My own solution to that is to avoid starting my YouTube Listening - LOL: "Listening" at great computational expense! - to avoid starting YouTube on the same track twice. Further, when presented with a choice of two or more videos to listen to, I never ever ever listen to one I've listened to before.
Recall as well my having mentioned that I am absolutely serious I have FIVE THOUSAND FACEBOOK FRIEND. While that was at first a huge pain in the ass as anyone would expect, it was not long at all before I puzzled over where all my friends had gone!
Zuck Optimized My Mother Fucking Paperclips.
My eventual solution was to tag hundreds of my Friends from just one post; as that caused some of them dismay at my apparent spamming, I now instead tag different selections of perhaps fifty friends with each of my posts.
For me personally as a writer, to have five thousand facebook friends as well as just shy of one thousand twitter followers is _huge_, and leads to my confidence that my Self-Published And Therefore Not Notable Enough For Wikipedia Guacamole Road [guacamoleroad.com] will be a New York Times Bestseller.
And Yes:
I Am Absolutely Serious.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Friday March 08 2019, @09:44AM (1 child)
as if there weren't people dying to get on national tv and able to read up news. Cost is not an issue.
The real reason is educating the viewer to interact with AI. Since bots and AI are the slaves of the technocracy, you lowly meatbag will have to respect their 'rights'. I tell you, if this is where your meatbag rulers want to take you, skynet is the less troublesome thing that can happen to you.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @11:16PM
So says the resident SN bot.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Friday March 08 2019, @12:44PM
Another magnificent job by China. English Artificial Intelligence Anchor is VERY NEUTRAL. I can hear it in his voice. And he's very fair, he'll never pull a Megyn -- he says EXACTLY what he's told to. And by the way, he won't pull a Gretchen Carlson either. ZERO lawsuits from this guy. Because, how can a Robot claim Sexual Harrassment? They love sex even more than we do, they're built for nonstop screwing -- not just screwing, they do everything sexual. By the way, sorry China, we don't want sex with some Chinese guy. We want female. Blonde like Martha MacCallum. And in the Bazonga Department we prefer "huge." Think big, think like Roger Ailes.
Yes, China has the solution to Fox Derangement Syndrome. The cure for Goofy Tom Perez and the Radical Leftist D.N.C. I hear buy invite China to host our General Election "debates." For the Presidential, and the Vice Presidential. Thank you, China!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @02:33PM (5 children)
Those folks who say automation won’t take all jobs need to start listing the jobs it won’t take. Bet this one would have been on the list.
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday March 08 2019, @05:17PM (1 child)
Yes. This definitely goes to show you how truly dumb certain jobs are. Human news anchors are basically just reasonably attractive people who read whatever is stuck in front of them. So yes, if your job doesn't require a lot of thought, you're eventually going to get replaced with a machine.
A true journalist, on the other hand, would be someone who can conduct a live interview and come up with their own followup questions and so on. *That* is something that AI is not going to replace for a while, if ever.
(Score: 3, Touché) by deimtee on Friday March 08 2019, @08:38PM
"And now we will be crossing live to ELIZA on the scene for further reports and an interview with the chief fire-fighting robot."
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Touché) by HiThere on Friday March 08 2019, @05:19PM (1 child)
Here's the job they won't take: Top management, or, alternatively, company owner.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @05:52PM
Of course not! Management would sooner kill the program than let an automated drone take their jobs away. Management's sole prerogative is to find ways to eliminate our jobs, not theirs.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 09 2019, @12:32PM
The Television News Anchors Read The Newspaper.
I Swear I'm Not Making This Up.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by noneof_theabove on Friday March 08 2019, @04:57PM
Look at that typical woman on our news..
Perfect arm position, paper never moves, eyes don't blink.....
Couldn't be more artificial.
I'm not afraid of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Stupidity scars the hell out me and Fux Nuz has that in the bag.
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday March 08 2019, @05:08PM (1 child)
This just looks like sophisticated animation to me. If all the anchor is doing is reading what is being texted to it, that's just animation. Wake me when they start doing live interviews and coming up with their own questions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday March 08 2019, @05:24PM
This is coming out of China. If they do an interview, both sides will be scripted to ensure that the official news line is not crossed.
That said, while it may not be AI, it's an artificial human simulation in a job role where the desire is putting a human face on a pre-scripted presentation. And it is reportedly don't a decent job of that. That the job doesn't require intelligence, but merely following orders is one reason it's easy to automate. Acting sufficiently like a natural human to provoke empathic acceptance is the hard part of THIS job.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday March 08 2019, @08:13PM
It is China, they could be lying outrageously. While it it probably possible to build a 3d model that will read text believably it is just as likely they are cheating and doing motion capture and using a human voice(s) as a pattern to process into sounding like their artificial person.
But it is obvious that in a country with such a large population they aren't doing this to save money. It is about control. With this, even if broadcasting coverage of a live event they can be assured their "anchor" doesn't go off script. They just have to have absolute control over the tech and the people writing the scripts but that is a solvable problem. The problem with human anchors is the audience develops a bond with them so replacing them at the first hint of crimethink is counterproductive. Replacing unseen and unnamed writers is simple.
TLDR; version, Communists gotta Communist. On the other hand CNN is proof enough that a State controlled media can be kept under tight enough control with human newsreaders. On the gripping hand, an AI is probably cheaper than Anderson Cooper.