[hotsauceror]

The cost of operating television studios and paying related staff, including on-air talent, is probably significant. I can easily see major news networks turning to AI-generated newsreaders. TikTok is already full of AI voiceovers; seems like a short leap, to me.

[Hamuko]

Is the cost of on-air talent so great that you want to replace recognisable faces of your network with a generic voiceover?

Personally, I consider TikTok very different to news networks. TikTok is also primarily vertical video. Are news networks going to do that too?

[hotsauceror]

I don't quite follow this point. Master Chief is recognizable. So is Lara Croft. So is Darth Vader's voice. Networks could easily develop virtual personalities with distinctive, bankable, appealing characteristics.

They wouldn't have off-air scandals, require insurance, pensions, teams of wardrobe and makeup artists, security details; They wouldn't need to travel. And that is just the on-air talent. You can replace thousands of tv studios all over the world with a handful of workstations and compute power.

[Hamuko]

And why haven't they? Master Chief has been around since 2001, Lara Croft since 1996 and Darth Vader since 1977. The technology has been around for ages, and as far as I know, no networks have opted for virtual anchors.

Just from where you are pulling the data that on-air personalities are too expensive?

[hotsauceror]

I don't have a good answer for why they haven't already. I have wondered about the possibility of doing this for 10 years or more.

"The data that on-air personalities are too expensive?" It doesn't seem to me , for the purposes of this conversation, that identification of a cost center required a quantitative analysis. The cost of human talent is non-zero, presumably large enough to merit scrutiny, and unpredictable; that is sufficient, to my way of thinking. So is the cost of the equipment and infrastructure to capture and transmit video image of that human talent, and the humans who maintain and operate that infrastructure.

We've seen several decades of human cost-reduction initiatives, across multiple industries and fields of endeavor, so I'm taking that as evidence that if there is a cost that can be reduced or removed, someone somewhere is looking at doing so. Everything from assembly-line automation, to switching to email over inter-office memos and mailrooms, to the abandonment of fixed-benefit pensions, to self-service kiosks in fast-food restaurants, demonstrates that costs will be cut where they can be cut.

[vel0city]

I think there's a good chance people would watch an entirely generated character read the news, so long as they find the presentation reliable according to their world view.

Tucker Carlson or Wolf Blitzer or Lester Holt might as well be cartoon characters to me. There's practically zero chance I'll ever meet them in person, especially more that we'd have any kind of real human connection. What one cares about is if they think the overall source is reliable and what kind of information (or disinformation) their orgs are pushing to the people. Having them be actual meatbags is a liability, they'll pop too much ambien one night and say some pretty terrible things on social media compared to only ever being a highly curated output of the organization. Unless they pull a Tay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom

[KaiserPro]

> TikTok is already full of AI voiceovers

And it makes it look/sound cheap.

I think thats the biggest issue they will face. For example, a company that uses avatars and emojis just looks cheap, because it is cheap to do.

Are you going to pay for cheap looking TV, especially when you know its shit?

But then the more important thing to remember is that news isn't expensive because of the news readers, its expensive because it costs lots to operate a news network. If you news anchors are costing millions, you have a chat show, not a news programme.

[hotsauceror]

The way I see it is, it doesn't matter if I'm willing to pay for shit content/presentation or not. This discussion is not about what is good for customers, or for news consumers in general. It is about what is good for publicly-traded content providers' bottom lines. My opinions as a consumer of video-based news do not matter. They're going to give me what they want, regardless of what I think about it, and as they have done for the past 50 years.

It is no different than charging me for a channel package full of content I don't watch, cancelling my favorite shows, flooding their channels with unscripted reality garbage, or using "stunning" and "so-and-so just did such-and-such" on nominally serious news web sites. If I don't like it I can choose not to participate, but if I do choose to participate, I agree to accept whatever is offered to me; my opinion was neither requested nor required. So if the top three linear TV news providers chooses to go with an AI-based newsreaders that people initially don't like... so what?