James and Rose, the strange AI bots that were recently installed as newscasters at the local Hawaiian newspaper, The Garden Island, have been discontinued.
Employee retention is always an issue at local newspapers, and The Garden Island newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters – usually transplants from the mainland like myself – would only stay a few years before moving on, and some only lasted months.
After two months on the air, James and Rose have joined our ranks as their broadcast has been discontinued, according to a representative of The Garden Island’s parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI). The pair was designed by Caledo, an Israeli firm that turns articles into videos where AI hosts discuss the news with each other. The Garden Island 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 — still the goal, according to a spokesman.
While OPI declined to comment further, and Caledo declared the program a success without elaborating on this specific scenario, it seems likely that a widely negative public response influenced the decision to end James and Rose’s tenure at The Garden Island.
James, a middle-aged Asian, and Rose, a younger redhead, have never been able to figure out how to present the news in a way that isn’t too off-putting to viewers. Their program, which aired twice a week on Youtube, Facebook and Instagram, covered topics as diverse as a fall pumpkin giveaway and a labor slaughter vigil, all in the same distant, businesslike tone of creatures incapable of understanding human emotion.
In a particularly stilted conversation about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And how did those free pumpkins affect the community?”, to which James replied, “The free pumpkins brought joy to many.”
They constantly busted out difficult Hawaiian names and even had surprising fights with much simpler words. On their last show on Nov. 4, while discussing an air rifle championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with the word “referee.”
In the polarized months leading up to the election, the pair managed to inspire visceral, bipartisan disdain. The comments below the videos were almost universally negative.
