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Mirage Launches An All-Day AI News Channel
Courtesy of Mirage
An AI startup called Mirage hosted a day-long, fully AI-generated news broadcast to show off its avatar tech.
The Big Picture: Every day, it seems like some startup is looking to replace humans with AI avatars. But relying on AI for the news isn’t just about whether it’s possible to pull off — it’s about whether people trust the tech to report it accurately.
Behind The Scenes: Mirage, which is already valued at $500 million, used its Avatar X model and $30,000 in tokens for Claude Code, ChatGPT’s image generator, and Google’s Gemini Text-to-Speech feature to pull off the 24-hour experiment.
The news broadcast, dubbed “Mirage News Network,” featured four AI-generated news anchors modeled after “’80s-style newscasters,” according to Variety.
It covered real stories licensed from Reuters, featuring video packages from actual journalists and stock footage. There were even AI-generated commercials.
It also included AI interview guests — about a dozen venture capitalists who agreed to have their likenesses used and approved the scripts (hilariously, Fyre Fest’s Billy McFarland was part of the group).
Unsurprisingly, the AI newscasters got a lot of things wrong, including calling an actual woman in one of the Reuters video packages President Trump. Mirage corrected the inaccuracies via posts on X.
Last Broadcast: The broadcast reached 50,000 viewers on X and garnered 824,000 impressions, partly from accounts that were paid to promote it (like Historic Vids, which has 6.1 million followers). Mirage CEO Gaurav Misra said the goal was never to fool people into thinking the broadcast was real, but to see if people might actually be interested in nakedly apparent AI-generated newscasters commenting on real headlines — there was plenty of signage announcing that it was all AI.
People may have been interested during this first livestream, but several national surveys show that Americans are really not fans of the idea… at least right now. In May, 40% of Americans told Gallup they would trust information less if they knew a newsroom used AI.
The Future: It wouldn’t be surprising if some companies in Silicon Valley — which has suddenly become interested in media outlets — decide to roll out an AI news channel in a bid to prove that it can be impartial.
Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.