Jim Acosta used to report from the White House lawn. Now, he talks to ghosts on YouTube.

In the past six months the former CNN presenter has built a YouTube following of just under 100,000 subscribers, providing another example of a new type: the mainstream news anchor who heads to the internet to do it their own way. For UK analogues, think of Piers Morgan or Dan Wootton.

To build his business, Acosta needs cut-through and viral moments. This week he thought he’d found one when he staged an interview with Joaquin Oliver, who was killed in the Parkland school shooting seven years ago. On what would have been his 25th birthday, a digital avatar of Oliver was presented to Acosta for an interview. The AI was built with the permission of Oliver’s parents, who are gun-control campaigners, while his voice had already been synthesised to robocall US voters.

“What happened to you?” Acosta asks in this week’s interview. “I appreciate your curiosity,” the Oliver avatar responds, robotically. “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It’s important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone.”

Acosta asks Oliver about his favourite sport. “I love basketball,” comes the response. “It’s such a fun way to connect with friends and show off some skills, plus there’s nothing like the thrill of a good game.” Their chat about Star Wars somehow manages to be even more hackneyed.

It is hard to escape the view that this is a version of Frankenstein’s monster with the bolt still visible in the neck. The avatar resembles a ChatGPT agent, fed on a few of Oliver’s high-school blogs, complete with ElevenLabs-style voice cloning and a janky animation of a single photo. There is nothing at all particular to its subject’s intellect, perspective or personality. Yet Acosta is spellbound, gaping as though talking to Lazarus himself. “I really felt like I was speaking with Joaquin,” he tells Oliver’s father afterwards. “It’s just a beautiful thing.”

Leaving aside the many implications for digital identity ownership, this is definitely not the last interview-seance. Acosta has broken through the bad-taste barrier, and others will push further.

The problem with broadcast news has long been the howling picture void. Think of the endless tracking shots from a helicopter flying over a crime scene, or the same 90 seconds of tape of police barriers. Maybe throw in the occasional bit of archive material. Words are cheap, but video remains stubbornly expensive. AI will help plug that void.

Well over a decade ago, a Taiwanese news company achieved viral fame by putting together explainer packages on popular stories, such as Tiger Woods’s 2009 car crash, using the cheap 3D animation that was just beginning to emerge. The outlet became a source of internet mirth — but, as a financial model, it worked.

Today we have many better tools at our disposal, and the news game has become much more of a Wild West again. The family of Michael Schumacher, who has not appeared in public since a 2013 skiing accident, last year won a legal case against a German magazine which claimed to have an exclusive interview with the ex-Formula One champion — only his answers were entirely computer-generated. Acosta at least received permission from Oliver’s family, but the guardrails are off and the pressure is on. Expect more such AI interviews in the future.

The irony is that a GPT can only ever be passingly trained on the thoughts of any single individual. Its stock is the sum of all human written knowledge, from Beowulf to the tweets of Kanye West. In truth, Acosta was talking to everyone — with a machine geared towards giving him the answers he desired. Its name is Legion, and that is a far more ghoulish thought.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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