The news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests.
“Water spinach looks at water spinach. Turns out that water spinach isn’t just a name,” says the presenter, in an extended metaphor about Tsai being “Hollow Tsai” – a pun related to the Mandarin word for water spinach.
This is not a conventional broadcast journalist, even if the lack of impartiality is no longer a shock. The anchor is generated by an artificial intelligence programme, and the segment is trying, albeit clumsily, to influence the Taiwanese presidential election
The news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests.
“Water spinach looks at water spinach. Turns out that water spinach isn’t just a name,” says the presenter, in an extended metaphor about Tsai being “Hollow Tsai” – a pun related to the Mandarin word for water spinach.
This is not a conventional broadcast journalist, even if the lack of impartiality is no longer a shock. The anchor is generated by an artificial intelligence programme, and the segment is trying, albeit clumsily, to influence the Taiwanese presidential election.
The source and creator of the video are unknown, but the clip is designed to make voters doubt politicians who want Taiwan to remain at arm’s length from China, which claims that the self-governing island is part of its territory. It is the latest example of a sub-genre of the AI-generated disinformation game: the deepfake news anchor or TV presenter.
Such avatars are proliferating on social networks, spreading state-backed propaganda. Experts do say this kind of video will continue to spread as the technology becomes more widely accessible.
“It does not need to be perfect,” said Tyler Williams, the director of investigations at Graphika, a disinformation research company. “If a user is just scrolling through X or TikTok, they are not picking up little nuances on a smaller screen.”
Beijing has already experimented with AI-generated news anchors. In 2018, the state news agency Xinhua unveiled Qiu Hao, a digital news presenter, who promised to bring viewers the news “24 hours a day, 365 days a year”. Although the Chinese public is generally enthusiastic about the use of digital avatars in the media, Qiu Hao failed to catch on more widely.
China is at the forefront of the disinformation element of the trend. Last year, pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and X distributed AI-generated deepfake videos of news anchors representing a fictitious broadcaster called Wolf News. In one clip, the US government was accused of failing to deal with gun violence, while another highlighted China’s role at an international summit.
In a report released in April, Microsoft said Chinese state-backed cyber groups had targeted the Taiwanese election with AI-generated disinformation content, including the use of fake news anchors or TV-style presenters. In one clip cited by Microsoft, the AI-generated anchor made unsubstantiated claims about the private life of the ultimately successful pro-sovereignty candidate – Lai Ching-te – alleging he had fathered children outside marriage.
Microsoft said the news anchors were created by the CapCut video editing tool, developed by the Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok.
Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s threat analysis centre, points to China’s official use of synthetic news anchors in its domestic media market, which has also allowed the country to hone the format. It has now become a tool for disinformation, although there has been little discernible impact so far.
“The Chinese are much more focused on trying to put AI into their systems – propaganda, disinformation – they moved there very quickly. They’re trying everything. It’s not particularly effective,” said Watts.
Third-party vendors such as CapCut offer the news anchor format as a template, so it is easy to adapt and produce in large volume.
There are also clips featuring avatars acting like a cross between a professional TV presenter and an influencer speaking direct to the camera. One video produced by a Chinese state-backed group called Storm 1376 – also known as Spamouflage – features an AI-generated blond, female presenter alleging the US and India are secretly selling weapons to the Myanmar military.
