Israeli anchors launch AI-powered news presented by digital avatar clones

Artificial Intelligence (AI) making big strides into today’s reality is a scientific history in the making. With AI increasingly becoming common in our daily lives, it also threatens millions of jobs across the world. The next on the list can be TV anchors. In Israel, TikTok-based news broadcast claims to be the world’s first fully AI-powered news network.

The broadcast channels have AI-rendered anchors who can present news in different languages, engaging diverse audiences worldwide. This cutting-edge approach to news broadcasting could set a new standard in journalism, but it also raises moral and ethical concerns.

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The initiative on ACT News, a growing news-content channel on TikTok, is spearheaded by Israeli journalist Miri Michaeli and long-time political operative Moshe Klughaft.

The broadcast channel first show AI-generated clones of Michaeli and veteran journalist Amit Segal, presenting news on their TikTok channel. These clones lookdifferent fromtheir real-life counterparts, and even the lip movements do not seem to match, but a casual viewer might easily take these videos as real recordings.

AI in journalism: A hot issue

The use of AI in newsrooms has been a hotly contested issue in recent months. Many of the journalism watchdogs have expressed their concerns about accuracy, transparency and the ethics behind presenting such content as being humanly produced.

But AI in journalism is not months old. News agencyAssociated Press (AP) has been using AI to produce corporate earningstories since 2014. In 2018, China’s Xinhua news agency created the world’s first AI-powered male news anchors and earlier this year debuted its first AI female news anchor.

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The popularity of generative AI tools like Google’s ChatGPT, has raised concerns across industries. These AI tools are based on the data mining of public data available online, leading to allegations of plagiarism if they are presented as original creations.

Keeping in mind these concerns, Segal and Michaeli have said that they will approve all the AI-generated texts spoken on air by their digital clones in advance of broadcasts, “ensuring accuracy and credibility”.

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The approval of all such statements makes the model not dissimilar to one in which a junior reporter or editor writes scripts for a senior anchor to read on air — except this method cuts jobs for reporting and writing staff.

Despite these moral and ethical concerns, ACT News has seen rapid success on TikTok, with millions of views and substantial investments backing the venture.

(With inputs from agencies)

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