It always seemed hard for the newspaper where I worked, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could be months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.
So last Thursday I was happy to see that the paper had hired two new reporters, even if they seemed a little odd. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who can't seem to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their first newscast, set to pulsating music that reminded me of the Challengers score. There's something very repulsive about their performance: James' hands can't stop shaking. Rose's mouth doesn't always match the words she's saying.
When James asks Rose about the implications of a strike for local hotels, Rose lists only hotels where the strike is taking place. A story about apartment fires “serves as a reminder of the importance of fire safety measures,” James says, without naming any.
James and Rose, as you may have noticed, are not human reporters. They are AI avatars created by an Israeli company called Caledo, which hopes to bring the technology to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.
“It’s boring to watch someone read an article,” says Dina Shatner, who co-founded Moti Caledo with her husband in 2023. “But watching people talk about a topic is fascinating.”
The Caledo platform can analyze multiple pre-written news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” with conversations between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have started using AI avatars to read out pre-written articles, this claims to be the first platform to allow the hosts to riff off each other. The idea is that the technology could give small local newsrooms the ability to create live broadcasts they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. That could open up embedded advertising opportunities and attract new customers, particularly among younger audiences who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.
Instagram comments under the broadcasts, each of which has been viewed between 1,000 and 3,000 times, were pretty damning. “This is not that,” says one. “Keep journalism local.” Another says simply: “Nightmares.”
When Caledo began looking for partners in North America earlier this year, The Garden Island immediately signed up, becoming the first outlet in the country to embrace the AI broadcast technology, Shatner said.
I’m surprised to hear this, because when I was a reporter there last year, the paper wasn’t exactly cutting-edge—we had a rather clunky website—and it didn’t seem to me to be in a financial position to make this kind of investment. As the newspaper industry struggled with declining advertising revenue, Kauai’s oldest and currently only daily print newspaper, The Garden Island, had shrunk to just a few reporters listed on its website, tasked with covering every story on an island of 73,000. Over the decades, the paper has been traded between several major media conglomerates—including earlier this year, when Oahu Publications’ parent company, Black Press Media, was purchased by Carpenter Media Group, which now operates more than 100 local outlets across North America.
