Like most newsreaders, Zae-In wears a microphone pinned to her collar and clutches a stack of notes – but unlike most, her face is entirely fake. A "virtual human" designed by South Korean artificial intelligence company Pulse9, Zae-In spent five months this year reading live news bulletins on national broadcaster SBS. That, you might think, is it then. To adapt the words of another animated newscaster: "I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords." The world belongs to the artificially intelligent and the News at Ten will never be the same again.

"The news is … there is no news." With those words, outside St Mary's Hospital in London awaiting the birth of Prince George in July 2013, my reporting for the BBC went viral on the internet. My somewhat testy response to standing in the street with nothing to say had struck a chord with many. Not for what I was saying but the way I was saying it. The slight annoyance that four decades of reporting from around the globe had led to this moment.

When artificial intelligence is fully operational, it will transform the media and marketing industries. In particular, I believe that synthetic personalities powered by AI will change the way we learn about new products and how to use them. In my previous article, I showed how the collapse of broadcast TV exposed a huge weakness in the advertising industry. And I pointed to the nascent field known as Influencer Media, and especially Virtual Influencers, as a harbinger of the future of engagement brand-building. What happens when artificial intelligence is available to any app, any advertising campaign, and any brand marketer? How will that change things? Here's my answer: the media landscape will be transformed so deeply that it will be completely unrecognizable. All the leftover junk from the 20th century will be kaputt, including one-size-fits-all video programs for mass audiences, appointment viewing of a TV schedule and the very concept of TV channels, and the outdated intrusion of interruption advertising. Personalized programming and fully-responsive adbots will be the new norm.

At the China Online Literature conference last week, Chinese search engine Sogou announced plans to create artificial intelligence-powered avatars that look and sound like two of the country's most famous authors--taking the experience of listening to an audiobook to an entirely new level. The first authors to get the A.I. avatar treatment will be Yue Guan and Bu Xin Tian Shang Diao Xian Bing. But if the project is successful, it could be a jumping off point for the industry to create avatars of even more authors. The audiobook industry is already big business in China and is expected to be worth more than $1 billion in the country by next year, according to iiMedia Research Group. A.I. avatars have the potential to give that an even greater boost.

NEW DELHI: China's state press agency has unveiled a virtual newsreader designed to deliver headlines 24 hours a day. Xinhua's "artificial intelligence news anchor" is a lifelike digitised reporter which can read out text by mimicking the image and voice of a real human presenter. The agency claims the virtual presenter -- a realistic looking man, sharply dressed in a suit -- "can read texts as naturally as a professional news anchor". China's state press agency has unveiled a virtual newsreader designed to deliver headlines 24 hours a day. Xinhua's "artificial intelligence news anchor" is a lifelike digitised reporter which can read out text by mimicking the image and voice of a real human presenter.

When science fiction critics Eric S. Rabkin and Robert E. Scholes argued in the 1970s that "no one would go through the trouble of building and maintaining a robot to hand wash clothes or pick up the telephone receiver," they were apparently unaware that Japanese researchers had already made a long-term commitment to develop humanoid robots that could do exactly that. The goal was to care for the elderly in the 21st century. To this end, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, industrial giants Honda, Mitsubishi, and Toyota, as well as university research labs around the world, began demonstrating humanoid prototypes. More recently, the desire to operate in disaster sites like Fukushima has motivated even more researchers to explore humanoid designs. But the dream of humanoid robots goes back much further than the 1970s.