Meet Fedha: Kuwait's first AI generated news presenter

China's Experiments with AI Presenters

China's state-run Xinhua media group was the first news agency in the world to introduce an AI-powered presenter in 2018. Back then, the presenter's voice and appearance were modeled on an actual presenter, and the AI presenter was called Qiu Hao. The roughness of the technology was seen in the videos shared.

A few months later, the agency unveiled a female news anchor developed using the same technology and dubbed her Xin Xiaomeng. The idea of AI-powered news presenters is that they can work round the clock and provide news to viewers without having to employ people in the studios at all times.

As with AI-related technology, it was feared that such innovations would put humans out of work very quickly, as businesses would choose to lower their costs and rely on tools that would work without a pause.

Fast forward to five years later, and we have a very different problem. AI-powered technology may still be able to take away human jobs, but it also carries more significant risks of spreading disinformation quickly.

As we have seen, AI models are only as good as the dataset they have been trained on. So, depending on the information used to train these anchors, the AI might lean on one side of the argument instead of trying to bring balanced sides to the story.

With Fedha, the Kuwaiti developers are confident that the AI could be trained to have a Kuwaiti accent, and its facial features also represent the country's diverse population.

If we could only ensure that AI is trained to have diverse and inclusive points of view as well, we would indeed be closer to making some superior intelligence artificially.