AI is coming, and it’s going to take your job. Or so we’ve been hearing for the last three years as AI has burned through cash, buried social media in slop, and entertained President Trump’s desire to take a big stinky dump on America. But while we wait for Tilly Norwood’s big screen debut, the British public TV network Channel 4 hopes to prove how fast this overhyped tech will change things by handing the reins of the new documentary from the series Dispatches, entitled Will AI Take Your Job?, over to a computer-generated host (which you can watch here). It’s a British TV first, and hopefully a last, because the more time spent with the fake presenter, the faker it looks. The animated anchor strolls down the street, speaking with the disaffected cadence of a British TV presenter, but it can’t interact with the world, question people on the street, or freak out over a giant chicken. Some would argue that those are essential to reporting.
While it seems like Channel 4 was using the technology to get ahead of the problem and steal its own job before OpenAI could, Dispatches used AI to highlight the misinformation business, which has become the real beneficiary of the AI hype cycle. AI has been a boon for plagiarism and intellectual property theft as well as producing propaganda and generating videos of women being murdered, but its most impressive product is still the unreliable Google replacement ChatGPT, which comes with its own set of problems, namely AI psychosis. Still, Channel 4 isn’t necessarily trying to scare us, despite playing into the AI industry’s most pervasive talking point. The show argues that the real beneficiaries of AI slop will be spammers and scammers. In a statement, Louisa Compton, Channel 4’s head of news and current affairs, revealed that, actually, the “AI presenter” isn’t capable of doing pretty much anything required of a broadcaster. We’re shocked.
“The use of an AI presenter is not something we will be making a habit of at Channel 4 — instead our focus in news and current affairs is on premium, fact-checked, duly impartial and trusted journalism — something AI is not capable of doing,” she said. “This stunt does serve as a useful reminder of just how disruptive AI has the potential to be — and how easy it is to hoodwink audiences with content they have no way of verifying.”
Dispatches: Will AI Take Your Job airs tonight at 8 P.M. on Channel 4.
