Artificial intelligence is one of the hot topics at present. Since its development, artificial intelligence has become the core driving force of a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, exerting a profound impact on the global economy, social progress and people’s life.
With the support of national policies and capital markets, the artificial intelligence industry in various countries is developing rapidly with high enthusiasm for industrial investment and entrepreneurship.
On November 6, an AI anchor, jointly developed by MBN TV and artificial intelligence development company MoneyBrain, was launched. Compared with the former rigid, mechanical image of virtual hosts, AI hosts based on human prototype architecture has been a considerable improvement in technology.
The AI anchorwoman, Jin Zhu Xia, reported the main news and several news items on the first day of her service.
As the first AI anchor in South Korea, Jin Zhu xia attracted public attention as soon as she appeared. Many netizens sighed after watching the news and said, “This is exactly the same as a real person”. It can be seen that the simulation and usability of this artificial intelligence are very high.
Whether it is to improve the production efficiency and reduce the production cost of TV news in daily reports, or to quickly generate news videos in breaking reports, AI anchors have an unlimited future in the application of different news scenes.
Development Trends
Artificial intelligence is one of the important achievements in science and technology in the middle of the 20th century. Its birth and development have great influence and benefit on human civilization. At the same time, philosophical consciousness and artificial intelligence are also discussed.
Artificial intelligence has been developed for many years. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed the idea of imitating games, which is a question of whether machines can think.
Since then, new programming languages, robots and automata, research and movies depicting artificial intelligence creatures have appeared one after another, making artificial intelligence more and more popular.
At the beginning of this century, after the BBC launched the first virtual host Anaova, the virtual host became a hot spot in scientific and technological research. Since then, there have developed many AI hosts in China, Japan and many other countries.
As early as the Fifth World Internet Conference in 2018, Sogou and Xinhua News Agency jointly made the world’s first fully simulated intelligent AI host. On May 21 this year, Xinhua News Agency launched a new generation of AI anchors.
Different from the previous versions of AI anchors, this AI anchor not only highly restored the hair and skin of a real person, but also greatly improved in three-dimensional sense, flexibility, plasticity, interaction ability and other aspects.
Moreover, according to the broadcast content, this AI anchor can make a variety of gestures and expressions that are more similar to a real person.
AI anchors are not only used in news columns. At the CCTV Network Spring Festival Gala in 2019, AI hosts based on the four famous hosts Sa Beining, Zhu Xun, Gao Bo and Long Yang took the stage.
Virtual hosts are endowed with the appearance, voice and personality of real people in the digital world. In order to distinguish virtual hosts from real hosts, the technical team also makes a certain degree of distinction in image design.
After co-hosting with his AI, Sa said, “The development of technology is really beyond our imagination”.
The development of artificial intelligence in the next ten years will present four major trends.
- Cognitive intelligence continues to make breakthroughs. In smart education, smart health care, smart cities, smart customer service, smart justice and other areas, artificial intelligence will show a trend of rapid development.
- The era of the internet of everything is coming, and everything can interact and talk to each other. The breakthrough of speech recognition technology will drive the voice interaction under the scene to be more intelligent and practical.
- Emotional computing has ushered in new demands, and the era of human-computer co-existence can be expected in the future. Artificial intelligence can realize emotion recognition and emotion synthesis in machine dialogue, which will help identify and solve emotional appeals, so as to make society warmer.
- The progress of the brain-computer interface is accelerating, and the future of the era of human-computer co-existence is promising. The development of brain-computer interface technology is likely to greatly boost the application of artificial intelligence in the next decade.
Basic Principles
How did AI anchors come into being? After making the news of the day into the broadcast draft and uploading the news picture after the subtitle and video editing of the program director, AI anchors can imitate the tone and mouth shape according to the data of deep learning.
At present, the production of an AI anchor cycle is also very short. On the basis of the AI voice technology, there is no need for the host to input a lot of text to establish the voice database.
The sound model can be established by extracting the feature parameters and using the migration learning algorithm with dozens of short standard original sounds. As a result, any input content can be read or sung in the voice of the host, and can even be used in other languages.
As more and more data is implanted, the AI hosts will acquire more skills, even including the preferences and speaking styles of the prototype hosts, which are more similar to them at another level.
In addition, the current deep learning and machine learning have the ability to learn more about the original automation rules — to discover the rules by themselves. In other words, since it is difficult for humans to find the details in the rules, AI can train computers to learn to find the inner rules and details.
R&D Significance
As the saying goes, “one minute on the stage and ten years of practice off the stage.”, the development of AI has greatly accelerated the process of training virtual hosts. It is certain that there will be more versatile and perfect AI anchors on the screen in the future.
First of all, the scene that AI anchors can use is the short news broadcast, which will undoubtedly change the current broadcasting and television format. While saving a lot of costs, it can also reduce a part of the repetitive, highly stylized jobs.
In addition, it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process to train an experienced and excellent host. On the contrary, to make an AI host, you only need to input text to broadcast in real time for 24 hours, and successfully achieve “plug and play”. In this way, time and economic costs can be greatly reduced.
According to experts in the field of artificial intelligence, the replacement of human beings by AI is an unstoppable trend. According to its development speed and assumption, it can be divided into four steps:
Stage 1: Replace blue-collar workers
Stage 2: Replace white-collar workers
Stage 3: Replace the manager
Stage 4: Replace the artist
Therefore, if you are an industrial worker who repeats the same operation on the assembly line, the reality is very harsh. The first step for AI to complete is to replace human beings to do this simple job. They are also more accurate, do not have a negative impact on work due to emotion or fatigue. What’s more, they can work all day.
The development of artificial intelligence is no longer a distant thing in science fiction. Today, artificial intelligence is not just a new technology. It is a self-learning software algorithm used to perform tasks normally performed by humans.
Huge improvements in machine learning methods have multiplied the use of artificial intelligence and thus enhanced human capabilities. Artificial intelligence is now a kind of concern not only for global technology companies but for all businesses aiming to remain competitive in specific markets.
limitations
Hosting requires a variety of qualities such as professional ability, knowledge and experience. The current role of the AI anchor is simply to replace the host’s basic skill: the delivery of information.
However, a good host depends on the knowledge, cultural talent and so on, not just the training of skills. From the perspective of the audience, AI anchors can satisfy the most basic information informing function, but in terms of satisfying emotional needs, highly intelligent AI is far inferior to real human news anchors.
At present, AI anchors are deficient in deep thinking independently, while human news anchors can deal with news reports flexibly according to their intelligent logic in the process of live broadcasting, which is also an irreplaceable part.
In addition, AI technology has two major difficulties — the processing of emotion and rhythm, which is different from the real person. It is difficult for AI anchors to reach the state of a real person in terms of rhythm and expression. As a result, we can quickly distinguish between the real person and the AI anchor when watching.
As the technology continues to mature, AI anchors may replace some of the online broadcasting work of real anchors in the future, but this does not mean that they can replace all anchors, such as some offline real interaction and impromptu content.
Indeed, in the content production process of media, the application of artificial intelligence to machine news writing can reshape the news production process and put human resources into deeper and more creative news exploration work.
However, the advantages of artificial intelligence are mainly limited to standardization, and there are still great deficiencies in creativity, artistry, thinking and intimacy.
In short, there is a big gap between AI’s interpretation of “human nature”. For traditional news programs, news broadcasting is not the restoration of AI broadcast onomatopoeia, but the “personalized output”.
Although technological innovation has lowered the threshold of professionalism, the requirements for professionalism will be higher and higher.
Irreplaceable Content
With the continuous development of science and technology, artificial intelligence technology will certainly bring convenience to human beings in all aspects and dimensions in the future.
But at the same time, it will also bring some challenges to the society. As a result, the rational use of AI is also particularly important.
There may still be many people who are anxious about the future of hosting industry, but in today’s society, there are many things that cannot be replaced by machines.
1. Voice.
We often have an impressive memory of a host because of a piece of voice. Language is the transmission of emotion and the emotional resonance based on sound.
Through hosting, we can feel the professional language quality, the rich experience and cultural background of the host accumulated over the years. A piece of voice, just because it is behind the real person, it is even more precious.
2. Education.
Language education is not a rigid copy of the text, but more lies in the deep cultivation of thinking ability and logical ability. Language teaching is bound to be inseparable from the interaction and communication of real people.
3. The Charm of Language Culture.
The charm of hosting lies not only in the accurate and flawless broadcasting, but also in the flexible use of cultural accumulation. Using sound to show the charm of language is a big advantage of human hosting over AI.
We cannot deny that the extensive use of AI anchors will inevitably impact the traditional broadcasting and hosting industry, making the already limited post-competition more intense and putting forward higher requirements for the host profession.
But we need to understand that artificial intelligence can replace the simple repetitive work. No matter how to simulate the sound or shape the image, it can not copy the feelings of people. The real person has better understanding ability, can also mobilize the active atmosphere.
Therefore, artificial intelligence is a trend of efficient development of the industry, but the possibility of completely replacing human beings is very small.
Just as in the hosting industry, extensive and profound culture needs to be endowed with deeper connotations by using sound language and it needs to be conveyed and continued through warm emotions.
