Virtual news anchors and presenters have been around for a very long time, but they’ve grow to be so good that government organizations are using them to interchange real people and get monetary savings.
The government of South Korea’s Jeju Province recently hired a news anchor to host a weekly YouTube show, “Weekly Jeju,” at a fraction of the price of hiring her former employees. J-na seems very experienced in her job despite her young age, but this is only because she is not an actual human, but a computer-generated virtual avatar managed by a non-public contractor. The messages it appears to read on the screen are also scripts generated by AI language models akin to ChatGPT. According to the island province, switching to a virtual news anchor was a less expensive option, as J-na and the news generating script reportedly cost just 600,000 won ($450) per thirty days.
“Hiring human news anchors involves significant costs, so we looked for an alternative and chose J-na,” said an official from Jeju Island Korean Herald.
While J-na is currently liable for delivering news on the YouTube channel, the low price of a virtual news anchor and the rise in quality will definitely make one of these service attractive to cable news programming as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp5-70FERbQ
We’ve seen virtual news anchors utilized in countries like China and South Korea previously, but mostly as technology showcases. J-na is one in all the few examples where the value is almost more tempting than the novelty.
