A good botch from before | Television

It is possible that Alba Renai, Mediaset’s new virtual presenter, is more charismatic and has a more interesting life than many presenters with skin and guts. Renai is likely even more human than many humans. I, of course, have met more robotic and heartless people.

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Siri or Alexa already had a much greater sense of humor and irony in their programming than some teachers and bosses I have experienced in my life, so I’m not surprised that Alba Renai hits the mark and there are those who want to use her as a friend or girlfriend. As I trust more in the talent of computer engineers than in that of television programmers, I predict a promising future for the new artificial intelligences that come to replace presenters and actors. How can they not do well if they don’t get tired, don’t have bad days, are never distracted by thinking about their child’s failure in math, don’t get divorced or suffer from anxiety?

The future doesn’t scare me, it just makes me sad, because I hate perfection. Of my favorite writers, I like their quirks, their repetitions, their weaknesses and those little stones that they can’t help but trip over. I fall in love with what is inharmonious and what breaks symmetry: a crooked nose, a freckle, the gesture of pushing up glasses, a barely perceptible tic that betrays an unovercome shyness. Those things.

It is difficult for an artificial intelligence to improvise bad jokes like those of Matías Prats or say the savage things of a Mercedes Milá or to go blank in the middle of an opening and end up blurting out, like Beatriz Pérez on the TVE news, that a Formula 1 goes “like a… like a cucumber!” It seems unlikely that the Alba Renai will be programmed to make mistakes and explore their spontaneity.

Hannibal Smith of the A-Team loved it when plans went right, but we viewers like it when they go wrong. The best moments on TV are blunders, from the millennial writers who have come to talk about his book to the last treacherous open mic that records the presenter’s jocularity. AI poses a perfectionist utopia, and by the time we realize that we enjoy something that computing cannot offer, it will be too late. There will no longer be any professionals left capable of serving us a good old-fashioned mess.

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