Chinese AI Anchor Reads English News And No One Can Tell He’s Not Real

In the last few years, AI has developed so much that it is now regularly applied to almost everything. Now, let’s go to Xinhua state-owned press agency and meet the AI anchor China has brought on air.

An AI anchor

It’s not clear what technology China used to build the anchors but it seems really close to what was used by AI like DeepFakes not so long ago. From the look, we can tell Xinhua has taken advantage of available footage of real anchors on air, then they animated the mouth with the AI system. As a result, the anchor is manipulated into speaking everything they want without spending too much effort.

As you can see in the following video, the result is pretty convincing, if you don’t mind some swelling in his jaw. In fact, the mouth and lips you see moving and speaking are actually animated, but the cheeks stay still. However, considering CGI that takes much post production to make, this technology can create an AI anchor to read the news within an hour.

Collaborating with Sogou, the local search engine, Xinhua made two anchors, one for Chinese broadcasts and the other is for English. With these AI anchors, Xinhua hopes to produce news reports cheaply and quickly for the TV channel, mobile app, and web portals. Eventually, they can call the anchors 24/7 and have to pay for the AI engineers only, which would be much cheaper and surely more efficient than at the present.

However, the AI anchors only copy the available looks, so their facial expressions are limited, but we hope AI will continue to develop and change that soon. Moreover, these AI anchors are capable of handling straightforward news reports, not breaking news or interviews as they don’t have any interactivity.

Well, but the latter drawback should not bother China, provided that the Chinese press is censored carefully. There’s hardly any chances for the unfiltered reports get revealed to the world without the government’s control. Therefore, the agency can always be sure what exactly their AI anchors have to say. In that case, making AI anchors for the government’s propaganda reports gives us an entirely new look and a much darker one too.