It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone leaves, it could be months before we hire a replacement, if at all.
So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists—even if they seemed to be a bit wrong. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who seems unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” showed their first news broadcast, with very pulsing music that reminded me of Challengers points. There was something very annoying about their performance: James’ hands couldn’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always line up with what she says.
When James questions Rose about the implications of the strike on local hotels, Rose simply lists the hotels where the strike is taking place. A story on apartment fires “serves as a reminder of the importance of fire safety measures,” James said, without naming any of them.
James and Rose are, you may have noticed, not human reporters. These are AI avatars created by an Israeli company named Caledo, which hopes to bring this technology to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year.
“Just watching someone read an article is boring,” said Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. “But watching people talk about a topic—it’s engaging.”
Caledo’s platform can review some pre-written news articles and turn them into a “live broadcast” featuring a conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner said. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have already started using AI avatars to read pre-written articles, this is said to be the first platform that lets hosts riff on each other one. The idea is that the technology can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live broadcasts that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. This can open up embedded advertising opportunities and attract new customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles.
The Instagram comments under the broadcasts, each of which garnered between 1,000 and 3,000 views, were quite painful. “It’s not that,” said one. “Keep journalism local.” Another simply read: “Nightmares.”
When Caledo began looking for North American partners earlier this year, Shatner said, The Garden Island quickly applied, becoming the first outlet in the country to adopt AI broadcast tech.
I was surprised to hear this, because when I worked as a reporter there last year, the paper wasn’t exactly cutting edge—we had a pretty clunky website—and it appeared to me that we weren’t in a financial position to make this kind of investment. . As the newspaper industry struggles with declining advertising revenue, Kauai’s oldest and currently only daily print newspaper, The Garden Island, has dwindled to just a handful of reporters listed on its website, tasked with covering every story on an island of 73,000. In recent decades, the paper has been passed between several large media conglomerates—including earlier this year, when its parent company Oahu Publications’ parent company, Black Press Media, was bought by Carpenter Media Group, which now controls more than 100 local outlets across North America.
