Avatar answered questions about the US election
With the avatar 'KI-Kjetil', our Norwegian colleagues in TV 2 wanted to make the American presidential election November 2024 easier to understand for the Norwegian public.
‘KI Kjetil’ is an avatar powered by artificial intelligence (‘KI’ in Norwegian) that answered questions about the US election in general, and about TV 2's average polls and was available through TV 2's website TV2.no. Journalist and news anchor Kjetil H. Dale lent both his voice and his appearance to the avatar. However, the voice heard is not Dale's voice. It is a synthetic voice built from 96 minutes of recordings of Dale's real voice.
Although it may seem that the avatar speaks freely, TV 2 has put restrictions on what the avatar can say, and what questions it can answer as it is an important principle that the avatar's answers are based on facts and source criticism. TV 2's journalists and researchers have over time ensured that the avatar is trained on fact-based and objective information.
”Also we monitored the questions and answers submitted to the service. In cases where we discovered errors, it was important for us to be transparent and open with our users about the mistakes that had occurred. As a result, we published all errors in a dedicated correction log that users could access. In total, we documented seven errors in the log, while 'KI-Kjetil' answered 70,000 questions.”, Editor-in-Chief Chris Ronald Hermansen from TV 2's Team RAI (Redaksjonell AI) explains.
'KI-Kjetil' was available to the users for 106 hours in the period 29.10 – 6.11 and answered a total of 70,000 questions from the public. And TV 2 continues working with AI, Chris Ronald Hermansen says:
“Our team focuses on supporting our journalists in their work. Our mission is to help make TV 2’s journalism more efficient and impactful using artificial intelligence. Looking ahead, we will continue collaborating closely with our editorial departments to explore the best ways to enhance our journalism and deliver value to TV 2.”