Will AI replace human news anchors the same way as it is taking over jobs in other sectors?

Odisha TV on Monday launched India's first regional AI anchor named Lisa, which can read news in Oriya and English. The channel said that the artificial intelligence (AI) anchor can speak a few more languages and would soon be hosting news updates. The channel claims its goal is to train Lisa to the point where it can host interactive shows. Lisa is not India's first AI anchor.

In March, a Hindi news channel launched India's first AI news anchor.

If we expand our horizons to the global level, the introduction of AI news anchors dates back to February 2018, when Chinese news agency Xinhua launched the world's first AI anchor, Xin Xiaomeng.

In April 2023, Kuwait News, a Kuwaiti media outlet, launched an AI anchor named Fedha.

In March 2023, People's Daily, a Chinese state media outlet, unveiled an AI-powered host named Ren Xiaorong.

The outstanding thing about Xiaorong was its interactive skills with the audience, as people could ask questions from it about the annual plenary sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

And mind you, the examples of these AI anchors are just the tip of the iceberg.

There are websites like https://www.synthesia.io/, which claims to have 120+ diverse avatars, who can act as narrators or presenters in your videos.

The next step in AI development can be a bot which looks like Katrina Kaif, Barack Obama, Albert Einsteen, or any other celebrity reading news for you.

People who have been following AI-related developments for the last couple of years know that this may be a simple task for AI developers.

AI anchors, which can read 24x7 news in multiple languages, hundreds of dialects, are also equipped with machine learning, capable of learning from mistakes and not repeating them.

That sounds very optimistic from technology's point of view and alarming from people's job perspective.

Will the growing number of news anchors make human anchors obsolete?

Saying that sounds as pessimistic as saying in the early 1990s that the expansion of computer infrastructure would make people jobless. 

But at present, what we see in everyday life is that AI is taking over many human jobs. The news industry is a small part of it.

Companies as large as Microsoft, IBM, and Google are cutting jobs due to the introduction of AI in their various sections.  

A recent report by US outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which looks at layoffs across every industry, showed that around 5 per cent of US jobs in May 2023 were directly related to AI.

"We do believe AI will cause more job loss, though we are surprised how quickly the technology was cited as a reason," Andy Challenger, senior vice president, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told Fortune. 

Crunchbase data says that funding to AI startups made up about 10 per cent of the current global startup funding.  

Will AI slash jobs considerably?

The current time is the transition period for AI, where it is disrupting the job market like it has never been disrupted.

The transition period can be hard, as it may see more job cuts, but once it gets over, AI can generate jobs like computers and mobile phones did.

As Infosys founder NR Narayana Murty said, AI would assist humans, help them with their jobs, and lead to more efficiency.

"Every one of these technologies has made the lives of human beings more comfortable. Computers made our life more comfortable in certain areas. Artificial Intelligence has made our life more comfortable by becoming assistive," Narayana Murty said at the 67th Foundation Day of All India Management Association in February.

These words give the impression that the introduction of AI news anchors will expand the horizons of the news industry.

It will deliver its news to more people in different ways, and above all, AI will possibly won't replace human anchors.