Will you ever be able to believe in your newscaster again?

This is not fake news. It’s a fake newscaster.

He is the latest star of the East – and his like could, one day, be popping up on a TV screen near you.

Did I say ‘he’? There, I’m already almost duped by this advancement in Artificial Intelligence. I should have said ‘it’.

Hot headlines from China is that its state-run Xinhua News station has unveiled the world’s first virtual reality News Anchor.

With the current lightning speed of technology advancement what is in the East today could rock up in the Westcountry tomorrow.

Xinhua has two anchors, one for English broadcasts and the other for Chinese.

We could have one for

Devon and one for the

Cornish language across the Tamar.

The Chinese versions are based on images of two of the agency’s real newscasters – both probably now fearful about future job security as their doppelgangers dominate the air waves.

The news agency promises to keep it’s audience informed as texts will be typed uninterrupted into the system 24/7 – and mouthed through virtual reality.

It heralds a brave new wonder world of broadcasting. Immaculate, emotionless newscasters inhabiting this cyber space are the perfect employee for the 21st century.

They don’t take a salary,

They have been accused as having no soul.

It is clever though, and surely only a matter of time before future refinements make it harder to tell fake newscasters from the real thing.

As it is, the real thing is blurring more and more with the figments of fiction.

Based on images of real people and possibly animated parts of their mouths and faces, machine-learning technology recreates humanlike speech patterns and facial movements.

On the Chinese station a synthesised voice is used for the delivery of the news broadcast, justifying its presence by telling the audience “the development of the media industry calls for continuous innovation”.

Perhaps this global race for technology overlooks the fact that we appreciate the news served up by a face that we can trust.

Somehow it would have less authority coming from a digitalised reporter that synthesises the human speech and expressions.

While such AI newscasting might be the springboard for some amusing sitcoms, it does seem alien to the real world.

It has not yet fully found its technological feet, but one senses some TV channels might find it an attractive proposition. It serves a purpose and protects a profit.

With today’s media in something of a melting pot with constant cut backs maybe we should be more aware of what might be around the next corner.

Aside from some of our more revered bastions of print and broadcasting delivering serious information in an informed way, there is an increasing swing towards trivia and dumbing down – ultimately depriving us all of being properly informed.

One can’t help feeling that, with less hands-on journalism and more reverence towards expedient AI, we will all be losers if the media moguls turn to towards virtualreality news anchors.