James and Rose, the bizarre AI bots recently installed as news anchors at local Hawaiian newspaper The Garden Island, have been terminated.
Staff retention is always an issue at local newspapers, and The Garden Island newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters – mostly mainland transplants like myself – stuck around for only a few years before moving on, and some lasted only months.
After a two-month gap, James and Rose joined us as their broadcast was halted, according to a representative from The Garden Island's parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI). The pair was designed by Caledo, an Israeli company that turns articles into videos in which AI hosts discuss the news with each other. Garden Island's program was the first of its kind in the United States, and Caledo said at the time that it planned to expand it to hundreds of other local newspapers across the country — this is still the goal, a spokesperson said.
Although OPI declined to comment further and Caledo called the program a success without elaborating on this specific scenario, it seems likely that a largely negative public response played a role in the decision to end James and Rose's tenure on The Garden Island end.
James, a middle-aged Asian man, and Rose, a younger redhead, could never figure out how to present the news in a way that wasn't terribly off-putting to viewers. Their show, which ran twice a week on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, covered topics as diverse as a fall pumpkin giveaway and a vigil for a mass slaughter of workers – all in the same detached, matter-of-fact tone of beings unable to understand it. understand. human emotions.
In a particularly stilted discussion about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And what impact do these free pumpkins have on the community?” to which James replied, “The free pumpkins have brought joy to many.”
They consistently butchered difficult Hawaiian names and even had surprising problems with much simpler words. In their last broadcast on November 4, while discussing an air rifle championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with the word “referee.”
In the polarized months leading up to the election, the pair managed to stoke deep-seated bipartisan contempt. Comments under the videos were almost universally negative.
