https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/09/the-worlds-first-ai-news-anchor-has-gone-live-in-china.html?fbclid=IwAR0Ifkrs46KzWr_pZxCc6S_FZAzWfO9F21ucljmHW3zkRitfG6c-JGC2UfE
I thought this was interesting given our conversations around labor this week. Xinhua claims that a benefit of the AI news anchor is his ability to "work 24 hours a day." But is he really the one doing the work 24 hours a day? Surely, there are human engineers/monitors/facilitators who oversee and control this presumably limitless labor... But by shifting the burden of work to the AI entity, their labor is effectively erased.
So interesting! I bet there have to be a crew of people who are attending to this AI around the clock. Surely for every minute it is live, there has to be someone monitoring to see if anything goes wrong and perhaps there might need to be an on call human who can fill gaps. What is also interesting is that wouldn't television news already has people working around the clock? What about reporters and other workers who aren't these technicians who are nevertheless part of the production of 24 news cycles even if they aren't visible at every moment?
ReplyDeleteSide note: will there be a buddy comedy about a news-cast duo, one who is a jaded old-timer and the other is a plucky new AI?