The world's first fully AI news channel just went live and there's not a single human on screen

Reuters just handed its wire copy to a newsreader who doesn't exist, has never taken a lunch break and definitely won't be asking for a pay rise.

On 12 August, Mirage (the AI video company that used to be called Captions) switched on the Mirage News Network, a 24-hour livestream on X reading licensed Reuters stories with zero human anchors in sight.

Four synthetic presenters built from Mirage's own Avatar X model, plus tools like ChatGPT's image generator and Google's Gemini text to speech, deliver the bulletins around the clock. The only real people who show up are the ones already filmed inside the Reuters footage itself.

This isn't the first crack at an AI newsreader. Kuwait's state news agency introduced "Fedha" in 2023, India's Aaj Tak has "Sana" and China's Xinhua has been running a virtual anchor since 2018.

A Los Angeles startup called Channel 1 announced a whole AI news network back in 2023 too, but never managed to get it broadcasting live at scale. Mirage looks like the first to actually pull that off.

It's not a huge leap for the company. Mirage rebranded from Captions to position itself as an AI lab, raised $75 million from General Catalyst in March and has spent years building tools that turn video creation into something you automate rather than film.

A news channel that never sleeps is just the same pitch, aimed at journalism.

An AI anchor doesn't need a studio, a makeup team, an autocue operator or annual leave. It can run in any language, any time zone, forever, for a fraction of what a newsroom costs.

Great news for a balance sheet. Less great if your job title currently includes the word "presenter."

None of this means the bulletins are wrong. The stories are still Reuters reported and Reuters verified, just read out by a face that was never in the room.

But it's a genuine test of whether audiences will keep watching news once they know nobody behind the desk is real.

Go and watch a few minutes of the stream yourself and see how long it takes you to clock that nobody there is human. If you can't tell, that's the story.