James and Rose, the bizarre AI bots who were recently installed as news broadcasters at local Hawaii paper The Garden Island, have been terminated.
Employee retention is always a bit of a problem at local newspapers, and The Garden Island newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters—usually mainland transplants like myself—would stick around for just a couple years before moving on, and some only lasted months.
After a two-month run, James and Rose have joined our ranks, as their broadcast has been discontinued, according to a representative for The Garden Island’s parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI). The pair were designed by Caledo, an Israeli firm that turns articles into videos where AI hosts discuss the news with one another. The Garden Island’s program was the first of its kind in the United States, and Caledo said at the time that it intended to expand it to hundreds of other local newspapers throughout the country—this is still the aim, according to a spokesperson.
While OPI declined to comment further, and Caledo declared the program a success without elaborating on this particular scenario, it seems likely that a broadly negative public response played into the decision to end James and Rose’s tenure at The Garden Island.
James, a middle-aged Asian man, and Rose, a younger redhead, were never able to figure out how to present the news in a manner that wasn’t deeply off-putting for viewers. Their program, which ran twice a week on Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram, covered topics as varied as a fall pumpkin giveaway and a vigil for a labor massacre—all in the same distant, matter-of-fact tone of beings incapable of comprehending human emotions.
In one particularly stilted exchange about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And how have these free pumpkins impacted the community?” to which James responded, “The free pumpkins have brought joy to many.”
They consistently butchered difficult Hawaiian names and even had surprising struggles with much simpler words. In their 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 leading up to the election, the pair managed to inspire visceral, bipartisan contempt. Comments under the videos were nearly universally negative.