In the past few years, artificial intelligence (especially computer vision) has made such leaps that it's only natural it be applied to pretty much everything. As evidence of that, I present to you Xinhua, China's state-owned press agency, which has a new 'AI anchor' on air.
It's unclear just what technology has been used to create the anchors, but it seems very close to the process used in the recent past by AI like DeepFakes, with the addition of a synthesised voice. By the looks of it, Xinhua has used stock footage of anchors on air, and then used their AI system to animate parts of the mouth and face. That way, they can have manipulate the anchor into saying whatever they need it to without too much difficulty.
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The end result is pretty convincing too, except for what appears to be a slight swelling in his jaw. In reality, that face he's pulling is a side effect of animating his mouth and lips but not the cheeks too. But as opposed to CGI, which takes a lot of post production to make, this technique can create a have an AI anchor reading the latest news in the matter of an hour.
Xinhua says it built two anchors, one for English and one for Chinese broadcasts, in collaboration with local search engine Sogou. Their hope is to use the virtual anchors to quickly and cheaply generate news reports for the agency's web portals, mobile app, and TV channel. After all, the anchors can be on call 24 hours a day, and don't need to be paid a penny, though the AI engineers behind them will need a salary. It probably still works out less expensive though, and it's certainly more efficient.
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One drawback is that, thanks to the method use, the facial expressions the anchors can replicate are limited, though advances in AI should change that very soon too. The other is that these can obviously only be used for straightforward news reports, as they don't have any interactivity to handle an interview or breaking news situation.
Then again, that last bit shouldn't be a problem in China, considering how much the press in the country is censored. It's almost impossible to get unfiltered news from the outside world before government agencies have clamped down on it, so Xinhua can always be exactly sure what their anchor has to say. In that light, creating virtual anchors to aid the government's propaganda reports takes on a whole new look, and a much darker one at that.