As a tech reporter, I am not a stranger to virtual anchors. As early as 2018, I noticed that Xinhua News Agency used a robotic news anchor, a male figure, for its coverage of political meetings and I wrote a story about how awkwardly it behaved in certain situations.

But this year, I was truly impressed by a new Xinhua virtual video anchor, a male figure. How naturally it interacts with the human female anchor! It gestures, smiles and speaks pleasantly as it mimics natural facial expressions and body movements.

The two hosts occupied immersive virtual settings created by augmented reality and virtual reality technologies, including in a virtual Great Hall of the People almost identical to the real thing, breaking the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds.

I've also been quite impressed by the technological advances of the past few years. Thanks to machine learning, big data and other state-of-the-art technologies, robot news anchors are becoming smarter and more capable. National Business Daily, a Chinese financial news outlet, has also used virtual anchors in their videos. The overall appearance of their two virtual anchors has improved to such a level that they are almost indistinguishable from humans, except sounding a little machine-like.

What impresses me the most, however, is that the program is produced entirely by AI, from writing the scripts using financial data to editing and broadcasting.

That's significant, for it means that AI can now take on "churnalism"－the churning out of routine, dry financial news based on news releases, financial data and official statements－and create videos on its own.

For now, this is only true of hard financial news, which centers on data and does not touch on more sophisticated issues involving people. But it's a really big step forward, one that could enable human reporters like me to focus more on producing in-depth interviews, research-based analyses, 360-degree features about trends and developments and, of course, insightful columns.

This tech trend sweeping the media industry now offers a clue to how virtual anchors are reshaping different sectors, including e-commerce. For instance, a virtual anchor named Liu Yexi managed to attract more than 3 million followers, just five days after her debut on Douyin, the sibling app of TikTok, a short video-sharing platform.

In her first video clip, which lasted roughly two minutes and was posted in November, the virtual beauty blogger "wore" the robes of a Taoist priest, sat in a neon-lit alley fit for a cyberpunk film, and applied her makeup in traditional Chinese style. The video went viral overnight.

So far, she has posted 15 videos. And she is still trending on Douyin, which won more than 31 million likes in all. At the time of writing this, she has garnered nearly 9 million followers.

She is not a living, breathing human－at least not in the conventional sense, but she behaves so naturally in videos. Small wonder, her popularity has exceeded that of many human celebrities.

Virtual idols are also getting increasingly embraced by both consumers and entertainment enterprises, as they are much less likely to be mired in scandals that generate negative publicity. Already, multinational consumer brands like KFC, Tesla, Louis Vuitton and Givenchy have commissioned virtual idols for promotional campaigns in China to attract Generation Z consumers.

To be sure, challenges still exist. Technological limitations, commercial difficulties and policy uncertainties for wider application of digital humans are what experts grapple with these days. The AI sector will, of course, experience ups and downs in the coming years. But I'd like to believe this is the start of a new era when we, human beings, have to learn to coexist with digital humans.