Beijing’s botcasters to take on unruly media?

Robotic news anchors, we thought, were relics of the days of government news channels, po-facedly reading out dull scripts to camera. That they could be humans and yet remain so expressionless and unsmiling was a matter of some speculation and amusement back then in India. So, it is not surprising that China, of all countries, has debuted an artificial intelligence (AI) fortified robot last week as a news reader at the fifth World Internet Conference in Zhejiang province. While China has chosen to tout the botcaster’s 24-hour capacity for work and resultant cost-effectiveness, the other uses of robotic media are manifest in a week that saw an allegedly obstreperous US correspondent being turfed out of White House press conferences.

As the robot resembles an actual (human) news presenter so closely, the point is moot whether Chinese developers have factored in the eventuality of him evoking the "uncanny valley" sentiment that AI developers dread. Research shows that humanoids that replicate — obviously, never exactly — real humans evoke uncanny, creepy feelings in observers; in fact, the closer the resemblance, the higher the revulsion. As credibility is a cornerstone of newscasting, such feelings may defeat the bot’s 24×7 efforts. Being China, it could perhaps train humans to be like AI humanoids to overcome this hurdle.