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China's AI news anchors
- sbhn 8y agoEngland created Max Headroom before America’s MTV took it over
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoThough Max Headroom is virtual in the “virtual YouTuber” or “virtual band” sense. ;)
- eskaytwo 8y agoAnd then he took over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_...
- iambateman 8y agoWatching the video, it’s pretty clear that this is an interesting stunt but would be considered unwatchable for any length of time. I can imagine this working well in a couple years, but today it’s a long way off.
- scj 8y agoMy first thought was towards Max Headroom. My second thought was on the Max Headroom incident. If it went live, how long before a copy lands in the hands of pranksters?
- lawlessone 8y agoThinking on that... someone could use it to declare a revolution, or say claim a disaster has happened.
- bananatron 8y agoOr hasn't happened...
- PakG1 8y agoHow's that different from AI-generated fake news videos, ala Jordan Peele invoking Obama?
- lawlessone 8y agoit's not
- bitL 8y agoOnce general-purpose GPUs get 100x faster (by 2025?), they'll get classified as weapons and one would need a strictly regulated license to do Deep Learning on them, with computations logged/snapshotted onto some governmental server. Gamers will be forced to stream from cloud.
- adventured 8y agoCan you name another common computer technology that has gotten so advanced it became classified as a weapon? The notion that in six years general purpose GPUs will be strictly regulated as weapons, is pretty comical. It'll never happen. In three or four years the improvemnet scaling will already be enough that whatever scenario you think must wait six years to justify strictly regulating GPU ownership, will already be possible. Absolutely nothing interesting is going to happen in the next six years that will require practically outlawing ownership of GPUs. It's a non-issue for the next 10-15 years at a minimum. More likely it will never be an issue, because of the expertise that will be required. You can do nuclear technology research on your home computer, entirely legally. They do a pretty good job of keeping track of people capable of building nuclear tech. If AI becomes a similar risk, they'll do the same thing with the best minds in AI (ie track them). Very few AI developers will be able to build particularly dangerous AI applications, the counter thinking to that is fantasy based, a form of technology fear (which for 50+ years has failed to prove out time and time again; the technology fear ideology has failed so often and so spectacularly that it should be entirely discredited at this point).
- bananatron 8y agoChina's track record with free speech makes the implications of completely bypassing any human 'journalist' kind of scary. I guess it's always been possible, but damn.
- PakG1 8y agoI'm not confident that's an issue. The press usually takes the party line anyway. In any case where the press feels compelled to not take the party line (it's happened now and then), they've spoken out. I think if the press felt it necessary, they could do a "special" presentation when they feel necessary. Honestly, I don't see a lot of difference between them and the way Sean Hannity blatantly takes the Trump line. The difference is that in the US, there's diversity of press and so diversity of opinions. I'm not confident there was ever diversity of press in China in the first place, so I'm not sure how much this changes. Maybe if the entire press cycle gets completely automated with no human oversight at all, OK. But I imagine there will always be human oversight, just because they don't want things to go off the rails. That's what happens right now. And if we reach the singularity, I'm sure an AI would have more guts to stand up and say what's on their mind than a human would.
- bananatron 8y agoIt would be very hard for anyone to watch most of Fox News and not see it as some form of state-controlled media in this administration. I guess my brain immediately goes to the situation you describe with little/no human oversight. If the only layer of human oversight that does exist values control over truth, this is just one more layer of human intervention removed.
- eiaoa 8y ago> It would be very hard for anyone to watch most of Fox News and not see it as some form of state-controlled media in this administration. I'm glad Americans have other, independent news sources. The problem with state-controlled media is not so much that it exists, but that when it does other options are often suppressed or eliminated in its favor.
- otoburb 8y ago>>The English-speaking anchor, complete with a suit and tie, is modeled on a real-life Xinhua anchor called Zhang Zhao. I hope that Zhang Zhao is getting a licensing stream for the use of his likeness. William Gibson was really ahead of his time when he popularized "synthetic personality constructs" as a mainstream literary trope[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru
- stuxnet79 8y agoNow looking back, I'd say the entire Bridge Trilogy was remarkably prescient. Especially so when you consider how SF / society has been transformed over the past couple of years. Worth a re-read.
- wufufufu 8y agoTop 10 technologies that sound scary when in an article starting with 'China'.
- ablation 8y agoI watched the embedded clip and the anchor pronounced "Jack Ma" as "Jack Massachusetts".
- bradgnar 8y agotime please, sounds lolworthy
- hiharryhere 8y agoAround 0:45 on the tweeted video.
- 0xcafecafe 8y agoReminds me of my google maps text to speech. I live near an airforce base and there is ARB in the exit name which it used pronounce as "ARB" instead of "A.R.B". They have since changed it to spell out the acronyms.
- mindfulplay 8y agoI can't wait for the exciting block chain anchors and the cloud anchors. Oh how about the new buzzword anchor??
- AWildC182 8y agoTwo words: Drone anchor.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThat'll be a fun etymology to unwind a century from now.
- kenneth 8y agoWe already have blockchain anchors: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mycryptopedia.com/what-is-a-stellar-anchor/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mycryptopedia.com/what-is-a...
- Quarrelsome 8y agoThe voice of fate can no longer be kidnapped, merely forged.
- NotAmazin 8y agoI like the idea, this is very economically sane since it will allow the news company to deliver news all day without errors from human anchors. Although people would still have to write the script, I know the state will always put their best people to write 24/7.
- avaika 8y agoAnd it will have no issues delivering "fake news" :) /sarcasm
- alanwong 8y agoDo you prefer watching an error-free (in that it doesn’t stumble) news segment delivered by a computer-visualized robot or an imperfect one by a human?
- tehaugmenter 8y agoI mean personally, News Bloopers are the best kind of Bloopers. We laugh at our own faults. It's more human this way.
- Proven 8y agoFake state-controlled news at scale American statists must be salivating at the prospect of having an army of those bots...
- browsercoin 8y agoNot at all challenging, considering the average CCTV (what a fitting name for a chinese tv station) anchor's range of emotional expression is limited to a knob. Might as well just produce a deepfake anchor with Xi's ugly ass face instantly traumatizing millions of Chinese children, who knows how many falun gong infants were sacrificed to save the poor sick Chinese elite (they actually eat the fucking placenta for supposedly viagra effect jesus fucking christ im outta here never EVER gonna catch me going to China)
- i_am_nomad 8y agoPlease try to not be so polemic and disagreeable in your posts, and instead bring a spirit of respect here. Chinese people are human beings.
- browsercoin 8y ago> Chinese people are human beings. not according to the Chinese Communist Party, they've killed more of their own than in any other wars.
- msla 8y ago> Please try to not be so polemic and disagreeable in your posts, and instead bring a spirit of respect here. Pointing out the crimes of the PRC is not disrespectful. Except, perhaps, to the PRC. > Chinese people are human beings. Nobody's saying they're not.
- browsercoin 8y ago> Except, perhaps, to the PRC. or people who has been unwittingly duped/brainwashed into buying that "China will overtake USA anytime now" propaganda. it's not limited to race, I've definitely seen some white American dude shilling for China...smh
- yourbandsucks 8y agoMaybe you're so bought into an "us vs them" mentality that you equated fair-mindedness with "shilling".
- kitd 8y agoI happen to think that how people react to news is determined to quite a large extent by the anchor's delivery. Stress and and intonation give clues about interpretation and expected response. Eg BBC newsreaders in the 1970s delivered in a very flat and non-opinionated style. Today it's full of their own "personality", ie opinion. Worrying therefore that such stuff may be just a few config variables away from being centrally controlled.
- nemo44x 8y agoLets take it a step further. Your news feed will know who is watching it, will have a loads of data on your interests, beliefs and opinions and will cater the same news event specifically optimized for your consumption. Instead of having a handful of news organizations which have obvious biases one way or another to attract that particular audience, we'll have a unique experience for every individual. I'm actually a bit surprised that print news hasn't gotten to this step yet. Just the injection, removal, or substitution of certain words can completely change the meta-message of the news article. Add a central authority and reprogramming people is as easy, as you've mentioned, as a few config variables.
- pfortuny 8y agoAs a matter of fact, it will be your own TV who makes the "anchor", no need to broadcast the whole thing.
- KineticLensman 8y agoAnd another step? - one suggested in 1968 in John Brunner's 'Stand on Zanzibar' [0] which has the viewers inserted into the very programmes they are themselves watching. Truly an awesome book, and still amazingly fresh today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar
- dredmorbius 8y agoListening to the 9/11 broadcast, the first thing that tipped me off was the anchor's tone of voice. Discovery accident likewise.
- ian0 8y agoWow text-to-speech doesn't seem to have gotten very far in the last 20 years? When we were kids we used to use a windows (3.1?) program for prank calls and it didn't sound much worse.. I would have thought by now basic things like word spacing and tones would have improved to the point where you would only realise its artificial occasionally.
- wenc 8y agoNot sure if they are using state-of-the-art TTS. This one [1] sounds a bit more natural. [1] https://neospeech.com/ https://neospeech.com/
- Mathnerd314 8y agoStill sounds stilted. Try Google's: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ (https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17167200/google-ai-speech-tts-cloud-deepmind-wavenet https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17167200/google-ai-speech...)
- AWildC182 8y agoKind of uncanny valley. The pronunciation of the words is good but there's no emphasis through the sentence so it sounds flat and kind of unsettling.
- candiodari 8y agoThey should make it a university teacher. Clearly it's got the core skill down.
- gambler 8y agoTry to enter a paragraph of text you didn't see before and close your eyes while it's "speaking". Do not read along. It does not have a lot of obvious artifacts that plagued older TTSes, but it actually is remarkably hard to understand.
- 8y ago
- achow 8y agoMagic Leap's MICA was more impressive https://youtu.be/QBd-egUFV_4?t=34 https://youtu.be/QBd-egUFV_4?t=34
- alexnewman 8y agoDoes mica talk? That's the hard part right?
- sebazzz 8y agoIt would be more realistic if his/its jaw would move.
- m3kw9 8y agoI predict people will less likely watch as a result them knowing the human isn’t real. Subconsciously some people want to see how the news anchor reacts, now this guy only has a single set of emotions and cannot give you the occasional off comment
- nhauz 8y agoThat's actually pretty cool. Reminds me of those youtube videos full of automatically generated videos with TTS. This would be the next step :) Also, anime girls.
- cauldron 8y agoReminder that one chief editor of the People's daily commited suicide days ago, following several similar suicides. A stressful job even to read propaganda afterall.
- eiaoa 8y ago> Reminder that one chief editor of the People's daily commited suicide days ago, following several similar suicides. > A stressful job even to read propaganda afterall. Yeah, I've been told these news anchors are expected to not make a single mistake in their speech or presentation during the broadcasts, and that they're timed so precisely that you could set your watch by them.
- blotter_paper 8y agoAnother dangerous job we can protect humans from!
- all2 8y ago> and that they're timed so precisely that you could set your watch by them. While your local news may not adhere to an absolutely precise schedule, most broadcast mediums are scheduled to the second. When a program starts, the anchor has exactly 15 seconds to fill. Roll a minute of ads. Then they have 3:45 to fill, etc. Watch CNN or listen to a nationally syndicated radio show, and time it. You'll see that the entire thing happens with sub-second precision.
- reaperducer 8y agoYep. This is the reason when I got out of broadcasting that my ulcers magically went away.
- cauldron 8y ago>Reminder that one chief editor of the People's daily commited suicide days ago, following several similar suicides. >A stressful job even to read propaganda afterall I guess. They even created a thing called "People's Search Engine" though it flopped.
- rhema 8y agoSounds like an espeak voice synthesizer.
- ilamont 8y agoThe idea of a virtual anchor was pioneered >10 years ago by a group at the Northwestern CS Department including Kris Hammond. The project was called "News at Seven." This video shows the later iterations of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3MRkFYM9Q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3MRkFYM9Q4 IIRC the early version around 2005 or 2006 used the Half Life 2 engine, so you would have Alyx Vance reading the news with a gun strapped to her belt. At the time I remember thinking that this would be great when the customization options were enabled, as you could just get the news you want instead of the stuff you don't care about that takes up most newscasts today, as well as preferred visual and voice skins to handle the narration. As someone who worked in broadcast news, I can say that most anchors do nothing more than reading from a script so this type of task is perfectly suited to replacement by a bot or AI or whatever you want to call it. Where it fails is the "banter" format that many U.S. local newscasts use and the ad hoc interviews that local and national anchors conduct with reporters in the field.
- reaperducer 8y agoWhere it fails is the "banter" Actually, where it fails is breaking news. Former newsman here, too. And I remember staying on the air for 12, 24, 36 hours or more with no commercials during breaking news (hurricanes, flooding, etc...), and it's not something any AI will be up to in our lifetimes.
- ilamont 8y agoThat's covered by the ad hoc interviews, which may be for breaking news or the live shot from a pending hurricane zone or something more mundane like a reporter outside the courtroom recapping a verdict from earlier in the day. What could happen in these cases is there is some sort of "live desk" staffed by someone from the reporting staff when the need arises. Or, rethink the way breaking news is covered altogether ... does it really need a handoff back to an anchor?
- reaperducer 8y agodoes it really need a handoff back to an anchor? Yes. While the anchor reads on-air, there are dozens of people behind the scenes doing other things. Some journalistic, some technical. All necessary and frenzied. This isn't really the right medium to describe it all, though. During a serious news event, it can be quite the madhouse. I've never seen a Hollywood film that really captured it.
- gophicer 8y agoHow is this AI?
- Tarq0n 8y agoThe image and voice synthesis is powered by deep learning. The news anchor itself doesn't possess any intelligence.
- nobrains 8y agoAnanova (circa. April 2000) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananova
- bob_paulson 8y agoThe rise of the machines as described by Thomas Ridd.
- coldcode 8y agoPersonally I could care less to listen to someone read the news. I can read much much faster. Talking heads seems so 20th century.
- SrslyJosh 8y ago> "AI news anchors" They read from a script, poorly. The video of the anchor is generated using ML, but there is no "intelligence" here, not even artificial. It's good propaganda for China, but not much more right now.
- pvarangot 8y ago> They read from a script "Real" or "human" news anchors don't? Asking because I really don't know, not to be pedantically poignant.
- tomcooks 8y agoI think the user was referring to the AI bit. This "AI news anchor" is a glorified TTS.
- fnordfnordfnord 8y agoDoesn't sound dissimilar from a news anchor made of meat.
- mooneater 8y agoSounds well behind the current best text-to-speech.
- thebirdsbeak 8y agoThat website is so horrendous to use it made my phone feel dirty.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI think it is fun stuff, and it was one of the plot points in Heinlen's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", but the execution is still a bit off. It gets really wild when you can generatively create a movie just from the screenplay description and perhaps a set of storyboards. That will make the amount of crap video available explode uncontrollably.
- amelius 8y agoSomeone still has to type in the text. So they might as well just read it out loud. I don't see the point.
- doodhwala 8y agoOther systems can be put in place, that generate the video and the text. The main takeaway is the realism of the news anchor through their implementation of the speech and lip moment synchronization - and how it may be a stepping stone towards a world where news delivery can be automated.
- ohiovr 8y agoPuppet anchors
- dghughes 8y agoThrowing the term AI around is like the word Cyber was in the 1990s.
- HillaryBriss 8y agoi wonder what would happen if such an AI newscaster interviewed the president
- doodhwala 8y agoAlibaba chairman Jack Massachusetts One would expect them to go through their demo clip before sharing it with the world!
- Rebelgecko 8y agoI've noticed a few different TTS programs do something similar. It leads to a weird uncanny valley when acronyms get substituted inappropriately. e.g. My address includes the Spanish word "del". One automated phone system from an insurance company read it back as "Delaware"