AI makes Vietnam television debut with report on itself

The report was broadcast on Cafetek program that is broadcast by Ho Chi Minh City Television’s HTV9 channel at 8.am every Sunday.

Considered the first AI-written report broadcast in the country, the event has piqued the interest of both tech experts and the lay audience.

According to the team producing the technology focused program, it was decided that a test script on “The trend of developing artificial intelligence in Vietnam” would be assigned to AI itself instead of a human editor.

The team was surprised when AI suggested five main parts for the script and wrote more than 500 words for each part. It also recommended that experts be interviewed for the report. After obtaining the text, the production team proceeded to dub it, carry out post-production and edit clips accordingly.

It turned out that the report written by artificial intelligence was informative, easy to listen to and carried the correct layout for each part for official broadcast.

Journalist Ngo Tran Thinh, mainly responsible for the production of Cafetek, said that the text that artificial intelligence could synthesize, arrange and write was close to one that would be generated by a human editor with one or two years of experience. He said it was not a very good original report, but did carry a lot of information and enough perspectives for the audience.

Thinh also noted that the time taken by AI to generate the script was just eight minutes, compared to almost an hour if a human editor were to do it.

The official broadcast attracted considerable attention with many forums discussing with great interest and enthusiasm the potential and impacts of AI use in the content industry.

Several experts weighed in with different reactions.

Mr. Vu Anh Tuan, General Secretary of The Ho Chi Minh City Computer Association, said: “It would have been difficult to know that this was a report written by AI if the production team had not publicized it. The information that AI has synthesized is fairly comprehensive and has a decent overview of Vietnam's technology industry.

“Obviously, with the large amount of data that it can process and give that AI learns continuously, this tech experience shows us that it can save humans a lot of time. Compare this to the way we have to manually search through many documents from different sources, which is very time consuming.”

Ms. Tran Thi Nguyet Oanh, Human Resources Director, HSBC Vietnam, said she was extremely surprised on learning that the report was written by artificial intelligence. It showcased AI's ability to synthesize and use words, she said. However, she added, this technology is limited to supporting faster work and cannot completely replace human creativity.

Most discussions on the broadcast agreed on the incredible capacity of AI today and how it was bound to develop even more in the future.

However, many commentators also stressed that in the end, technological progress must continue to serve people, not the other way around. They said that instead of being afraid that humans will lose jobs to this advanced technology, people should take advantage of its capabilities and reach, as the CafeTek program has done with its latest report.