“I’m Fedha, the first anchor in Kuwait to work with AI at Kuwait News. What kind of news do you prefer? Let’s hear your views.” This is the phrase in classical Arabic launched by way of introduction by “Fedha”, the first presenter generated by artificial intelligence to animate a newscast in the Gulf country.
Dressed in a white V-neck T-shirt, covered by a black jacket, she made her appearance on the Twitter account of news site Kuwait News on Saturday, as part of a project still in the testing phase.
The site, affiliated with Kuwait Timesthe leading English-language daily in the Gulf, wants to test the potential ofartificial intelligence to offer “new and innovative content,” its deputy editor, Abdullah Boftain, told AFP.
“Our jobs are in danger”
According to him, the presenter could adopt a Kuwaiti accent in the future and host a news bulletin on the Kuwait News Twitter account, followed by more than 1.2 million subscribers. “Fedha is an old popular Kuwaiti name that refers to silver, to metal. We always imagine robots to be silver and metallic in color, so we combine the two,” said Abdullah Boftain.
As for the physical appearance of the presenter, a blonde with light eyes, it reflects, according to him, the diversity of the population in this oil-rich country, made up of Kuwaitis and expatriates. “Fedha represents everyone,” he added.
His 13-second introduction video generated a lot of reactions on social media, especially from journalists. “Our jobs are in jeopardy. Will Fedha and her colleagues be our replacements in the near future?” one of them asked.
At the moment, the media have not revealed what artificial intelligence this virtual avatar will be based on or what its exact function will be. If Fedha is writing and prioritizing headlines, human verification would be more than necessary, given the tendency of generative AIs to “hallucinate”—that is, fabricate false information—and their inability to obtain it (the Bing version of Chat-GPT (GPT -4) however he cites some of his sources).
Source: BFM TV
