'Being on camera is no longer sensible': persecuted Venezuelan journalists turn to AI

The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who spent some of his happiest years chronicling life in Caracas, once declared journalism "the best job in the world". Not so if you are reporting on today's Venezuela, where journalists are feeling the heat as the South American country lurches towards full-blown dictatorship under President Nicolás Maduro. In the four weeks since Venezuela's disputed election, local journalists have come up with a distinctly 21st-century tactic to avoid being arrested for reporting on 21st-century socialism: using artificial intelligence avatars to report all the news Maduro's regime deems unfit to print. In daily broadcasts, the AI-created newsreaders have been telling the world about the president's post-election crackdown on opponents, activists and the media, without putting the reporters behind the stories at risk. Carlos Eduardo Huertas, the director of Connectas, the Colombia-based journalism platform coordinating the initiative, said far from being a gimmick, the use of AI was a response to "the persecution and the growing repression that our colleagues are suffering in Venezuela, where the uncertainty over the safety of doing their job … grows by the minute".