All the news that's fit for ... robots?

Don't like the news? Channel 1 is using AI to go out and generate some of its own.

I for one welcome our news robot overlords. Source: Midjourney.

Lester Holt and Wolf Blitzer, watch your back. Erin Burnett and Mika Brzezinski, it's time to start plotting your next career move. The robots are coming for you.

Early next year, a startup called Channel 1.ai will begin producing its own, entirely AI-generated newscasts — no on-camera humans required. In addition to replacing well-coiffed and highly compensated news readers, the service plans to use AI to automatically cull news stories, generate images if no actual footage is available, and personalize broadcasts to each viewer's preferences.

Here's a 30-second clip. The full 22-minute sample episode can be found here.

I find it strangely reassuring that the AI avatars also don't know what to do with their hands when talking to a camera.

According to Deadline, most of the news anchors in this video are based on scans of actual people, who were compensated for their role in helping to eventually eliminate human talking heads. [1] Some of the less convincing ones are entirely AI generated, but as AI technology improves, they won't need to use humans at all. [2]

The ultimate version of Channel 1 will be a personalized app — a "bespoke news experience that learns your preferences and customizes the subjects you're interested in," according to the not-a-real-human who appears at the beginning and end of the video. As company co-founder Adam Mosam told the Hollywood Reporter last July:

“Imagine watching CNBC, except what you’re looking at is analysis of stocks that are in your portfolio, or industries that you’re already watching, or if you’re watching sports, it can go more in depth on the teams that you love, as opposed to waiting for the parts of the content that you’re really interested in,” Mosam says.

There are even liberal and conservative hosts who can deliver the news filtered through a more specific point of view.

“Although we can give it to you in your perspective, from your set of opinions, we will never, ever break that wall of factual reporting,” Mosam says. “So I think that if anything, we can sort of bring people together because they feel like you’re talking to them with their set of facts, opinions and demographics, but we’re holding things closer to the middle, ultimately.”

So your Crazy Uncle who thinks space lasers are turning school children into drag queens can continue to live inside his news bubble, and you can continue to live inside yours.

Channel 1 says it plans to work with "trusted global news brands" and "independent journalists" and "fact checkers," but hasn't named any of them yet. Deciding what constitutes a "trusted news brand" is kind of the whole ballgame here. [3] Until they name those sources, I'm planning to keep my skepticism dialed to 11.

Other news you might use

This is hardly the only startup attempting to use AI to create an "unbiased" alternative to mainstream news, though it is the first I'm aware of that's gone full robo-Cronkite. [4]

I have an app on my phone called Worldly that does something analogous, featuring a really cool interface — a spinning 3D globe with little hot spots indicating news stories in different metro areas. (There's also a less impressive 2D version on the web.) Click or tap on one of the hot spots, and up pops a headline. Tap again to get an AI-written summary of the story. You can then read the story from the original source, leave a comment, or ask someone at Worldly for a fact check.

Then there are digital newsletter services like "Improve the News," which uses AI to scan news reports, then offers summaries of each story from opposing sides (even stories that don't really have two sides, or have too many sides to count). [5] Like this one about the recent climate change agreement at the COP28 conference:

Imagine the spin on a story where one side says the moon is a giant rock orbiting the earth at a distance of 220,000 miles and the other side thinks it's an enormous cheeseball suspended 12 feet above our heads. Both sides, am I right?

Objectivity my ass

I see this complaint a lot online: "Why can't I find an objective source of news?" Or, "Why can't journalists just report the facts and leave their opinions out of it?" Well, gather round boys and girls, for my mini-TED talk on the myth of objectivity.

At least 90 percent of writing a news story is deciding what to leave out. Does it matter that the person who is the primary subject of a story is wearing a clown outfit? Yes, if they're doing it in the middle of the Capitol Rotunda. If they're a circus performer, not so much. Who makes that decision? The person writing or reporting the story (or their editor/producer). [6]

A human being decides what's going to be a page A1 story — or the first segment in a broadcast — and what's going to get buried on page A17 or air after the weather report. Human judgment always plays a role. Algorithmic news sources (like Google or Apple News) are still relying on human judgment, they're just ranking stories based on some other criteria, like clicks or eyeballs.

At some point, somebody needs to decide which of the trillions of things that happen every day are "newsworthy." But news also requires context and interpretation. Yes, the house down the street caught fire and burned down. That's an objective fact. But why? Is their teenage son an arsonist? Were they cooking meth in the kitchen? Was it shoddy wiring? Have there been a series of mysterious electrical fires occurring in the area? Were they all built by the same contractor? Does that contractor also happen to be the brother-in-law of the city zoning commissioner? And so on.

You could probably train a large language model to digest all of the events happening in the world and distill them into news stories. I'm sure somebody is working on that as I type this. But the models will still be trained on what human beings have determined to be news for the past 300 years — using the same assumptions, applying the same biases. You can't escape it. Your best hope is that the people doing it are trying to tell the truth, as best they can, with without any hidden agenda. [7]

Shameless Self Promotion III: The crass and the curious

Speaking of biased talking heads, here is the third and final segment of my interview with Tschanen "TJ" Jackson about generative AI. This one is about the potential benefits of the technology, proving that I am not a sourpuss 100 percent of the time.

Would you trust an AI newsbot? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[1] The impact on the hair spray industry alone is likely to be catastrophic.

[2] Like a meatpuppet made from Impossible Burgers.

[3] Good luck getting everyone to agree on what a 'trusted news source' is. Bet your Crazy Uncle has some ideas.

[4] I think if they created a convincing AI version of Walter Cronkite (or Dan Rather) the app would become vastly more popular among a certain population.

[5] There's also one called "1440," named after the year the printing press was invented and/or the number of minutes in a day. I think it's entirely human curated, but don't quote me. It is very much a 'just the facts, ma'am' kind of news service.

[6] Which is why stories that focus on, say, why a certain elected official is wearing a tan suit instead of a blue one, are clear evidence of a biased news organization trying to manufacture a controversy out of thin air.

[7] See Crazy Uncle, above.