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.
“This is scary,” reads one Facebook comment from The Maui News, another local Hawaii paper. The nonprofit Hawaii journalism outlet Honolulu Civil Beat used them as a fundraising hook. “You no longer have to imagine a world where local news and information is generated by an algorithm,” wrote Ben Nishimoto, Civil Beat’s vice president of operations and philanthropy, in a September email, referring to the broadcast. “That dystopia is here. And it’s terrifying.”
I never like to root against fellow reporters, but I’ll admit I was also happy to see them go. While James and Rose did not actively supplant any existing newsroom jobs, I was concerned that the effort diverted resources that could be used on traditional media expenses, like human reporters, photographers, and editors.
The Garden Island was severely underresourced—for much of my time working there, I was one of only two reporters covering an island of 73,000. The paper was purchased earlier this year by the conglomerate Carpenter Media Group, which controls more than 100 local outlets throughout North America.
Caledo, while declining to disclose how much it was paid, said that new ads embedded in the broadcasts would offset the cost of the program. However, it does not appear as though OPI was able to sell a single ad on the videos.
James and Rose began every broadcast by announcing that the program was sponsored by Longs Drugs, a Hawaii local subsidiary of CVS. But Longs Drugs reported that it had a preexisting sponsorship agreement with OPI and that it had not been notified its logo would be used in the AI videos. “We have since asked that they run all Longs logo usage by us moving forward,” Amy Thibault, a CVS spokesperson, says. No other embedded advertisements appeared on the broadcasts.
Over its run, the tech did see some minor improvements. James began his tenure as lead anchor, at which point he was unable to blink and his hands were constantly vibrating. He was demoted to second anchor in mid-October, where he began blinking more regularly and his odd hand vibration was replaced by a single emphatic gesture.
But this proved to be too little too late. I wish James and Rose the best of luck in their future endeavors—it’s a tough job market out there.
