Xinhua–Sogou AI news anchor

Last updated
Xinhua–Sogou AI news anchor
Xinhua AI bots.jpg
Avatars of the AI: English ver. patterned after Zhang Zhao (left) and Chinese ver. derived from Qiu Hao (right)
Developer Xinhua News Agency
Sogou
Primary user/s Xinhua News Agency
CountryChina
Year introduced2018
Purpose Technology demonstration
(news presenting)
Language/s
  • English
  • Chinese

Xinhua News Agency and Sogou of China developed an artificial intelligence (AI) for news reporting purposes. The AI was unveiled in 2018. [1] It is touted to be the "world's first AI news anchor". [2]

The AI was unveiled at the 2018 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang, China. [2] [3] [4] The AI devises avatars patterned after real life Xinhua anchors. [5] The AI patterned after Qiu Hao spoke in Chinese, while the one derived from the likeness of Zhang Zhao speaks in English. [5] [6] The unveiling of the AI raised concerns of its impact on employment. [7]

Xinhua and Sogou would unveil Xin Xiaomeng, an AI with a female avatar in 2019. [8]

People's Daily would follow suit by unveiling their own AI newscaster in 2023. [9]

See also

Reference

  1. Handley, Lucy (9 November 2018). "The 'world's first' A.I. news anchor has gone live in China". CNBC. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  2. 1 2 Kuo, Lily (9 November 2018). "World's first AI news anchor unveiled in China". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  3. "World's first AI news anchor makes "his" China debut". Xinhua. 8 November 2023. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  4. "全球首个"AI合成主播"在新华社上岗-新华网" [The world's first "AI synthetic anchor" joins Xinhua News Agency] (in Chinese). Xinhua. 7 November 2018. Archived from the original on 23 November 2018. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  5. 1 2 "China's Xinhua agency unveils AI news presenter". BBC News. 8 November 2018. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  6. "'I will work tirelessly': China unveils artificial intelligence news anchors". ABC News. 9 November 2018. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  7. "Debut of China AI Anchor Stirs Up Tech Race Debates". Voice of America. 15 November 2018. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  8. Steger, Isabella (20 February 2019). "Chinese state media's latest innovation is an AI female news anchor". Quartz. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  9. Cleave, Iona (17 March 2023). "Can you spot what's wrong with this news anchor?". News.com.au. Retrieved 30 September 2023.

Related Research Articles

Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chatbot</span> Program that simulates conversation

A chatbot is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of maintaining a conversation with a user in natural language and simulating the way a human would behave as a conversational partner. Such chatbots often use deep learning and natural language processing, but simpler chatbots have existed for decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xinhua News Agency</span> Official press agency of the Peoples Republic of China

Xinhua News Agency, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. It is a State Council's ministry-level institution, and was founded in 1931. It is the largest media organ in China.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory</span> CS and AI Laboratory at MIT (formed by merger in 2003)

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baidu</span> Chinese web services company

Baidu, Inc. is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet services and artificial intelligence. It holds a dominant position in China's search engine market, and provides a wide variety of other internet services such as Baidu App, Baidu Baike, iQIYI, and Baidu Tieba.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human image synthesis</span> Computer generation of human images

Human image synthesis is technology that can be applied to make believable and even photorealistic renditions of human-likenesses, moving or still. It has effectively existed since the early 2000s. Many films using computer generated imagery have featured synthetic images of human-like characters digitally composited onto the real or other simulated film material. Towards the end of the 2010s deep learning artificial intelligence has been applied to synthesize images and video that look like humans, without need for human assistance, once the training phase has been completed, whereas the old school 7D-route required massive amounts of human work .

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sogou</span> Chinese search engine

Sogou, Inc. is a Chinese technology company and subsidiary of Tencent.

This is a timeline of artificial intelligence, sometimes alternatively called synthetic intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Goertzel</span> American computer scientist and AI researcher

Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and businessman. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general intelligence'.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in applications throughout industry and academia. In a manner analogous to electricity or computers, AI serves as a general-purpose technology. AI programes emulate perception and understanding, and are designed to adapt to new information and new situations. Machine learning has been used for various scientific and commercial purposes including language translation, image recognition, decision-making, credit scoring, and e-commerce.

iFlytek Chinese technology company

iFlytek, styled as iFLYTEK, is a partially state-owned Chinese information technology company established in 1999. It creates voice recognition software and 10+ voice-based internet/mobile products covering education, communication, music, intelligent toys industries. State-owned enterprise China Mobile is the company's largest shareholder. The company is listed in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and it is backed by several state-owned investment funds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fei-Fei Li</span> Chinese-American computer scientist (born 1976)

Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.

Existential risk from artificial intelligence refers to the idea that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to human extinction or an irreversible global catastrophe.

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its stated mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.

Wang Xiaochuan is a Chinese Internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder and former chief executive officer of Sogou. He has also founded Baichuan, an artificial intelligence company.

A military artificial intelligence arms race is an arms race between two or more states to develop and deploy lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). Since the mid-2010s, many analysts have noted the emergence of such an arms race between superpowers for better military AI, driven by increasing geopolitical and military tensions.

The artificial intelligenceindustry in China is a rapidly developing multi-billion dollar industry. The roots of China's AI development started in the late 1970s following Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms emphasizing science and technology as the country's primary productive force.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SenseTime</span> Hong Kong software company

SenseTime is a partly state-owned publicly traded artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hong Kong. The company develops technologies including facial recognition, image recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, medical image analysis, video analysis, autonomous driving, and remote sensing. Since 2019, SenseTime has been repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. government due to allegations that its facial recognition technology has been deployed in the surveillance and internment of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities. SenseTime denies the allegations.

Regulation of artificial intelligence is the development of public sector policies and laws for promoting and regulating artificial intelligence (AI). It is part of the broader regulation of algorithms. The regulatory and policy landscape for AI is an emerging issue in jurisdictions worldwide, including for international organizations without direct enforcement power like the IEEE or the OECD.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maia and Marco</span>

Maia and Marco are artificial intelligence used by GMA Network. Unveiled in 2023, they are used to fulfill the role of sports newscasters.