James and Rose, quirky AI bots who were recently installed as news broadcasters in local Hawaii paper Garden Island has been abolished.
Staff retention is always a problem at local newspapers, and the Garden Island Newspapers on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters—usually mainland transplants like me—will last only a few years before moving on, and some will last only months.
According to a representative from The Garden Island's parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI), after a two-month run, James and Rose have joined our ranks as their broadcast has been discontinued. The pair were designed by Caledo, an Israeli firm that turns articles into videos where AI hosts discuss news with each other. Garden Island's program was the first of its kind in the United States, and Caledo said at the time that he intended to expand it to hundreds of other local newspapers across the country – according to a spokesperson, this is still the aim.
While OPI declined to comment further, and Caledo declared the program a success without elaborating on this particular scenario, it seems that the decision to end James and Rose's tenure at The Garden Island was widely discussed. Negative public reaction played a role.
James, a middle-aged Asian man, and Rose, a young redhead, were never able to figure out how to present the news in a way that would not be too offensive to the audience. His program, which ran twice a week on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, covered a variety of topics, such as a fall pumpkin giveaway and a vigil for a worker massacre – all involving the same distant, incapable of understanding beings. Human emotions in the matter-of-fact tone of.
In a particularly stilted conversation about pumpkin giveaways, Rose asked James, “And how have these free pumpkins impacted the community?” To which James responded, “Free pumpkins have brought joy to many people.”
He consistently destroyed difficult Hawaiian names and had surprising struggle with even very simple words. In his final broadcast on November 4, while discussing an air rifle championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with the word “referee”.
In the polarized months before the election, the pair managed to inspire internal, bipartisan contempt. Comments under the video were almost universally negative.