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BuzzFeed plans to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT-style text synthesis technology to create personalized quizzes and other content in the future, according to an internal memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. After the news hit, BuzzFeed’s stock jumped 200%. On Friday, BuzzFeed formally announced the move in a post on its site.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said, “By 2023, AI-inspired content will move from the R&D stage to part of our core business, enhancing the quiz experience and informing brainstorming. We will see you provide and personalize content for your audience,” an employee said, according to Reuters. A similar statement was posted on the BuzzFeed site.
The move comes at a time when buzz around OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model has reached a fever pitch in the tech sector, sparking further investment from Microsoft and a reactive move from Google. ChatGPT’s underlying model, GPT-3, uses the statistical “knowledge” of millions of books and articles to generate a variety of styles of writing, depending on the topic, with results that closely resemble human writing. produces consistent text for GPT-3 works by trying to predict the most likely next word in a sequence (called a “prompt”) provided by the user.
In particular, BuzzFeed told Reuters it would not utilize ChatGPT itself, but would instead create a custom implementation based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology.
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In light of recent news that CNET is publishing articles written in AI (causing an ongoing controversy well covered by Futurism and The Verge), the move from BuzzFeed is a machine instead. Some worry that it marks a new trend in media that relies on content created by . Especially after BuzzFeed’s staff was cut by 12% of him late last year. The Wall Street Journal reports that “BuzzFeed continues to focus on human-generated journalism in its newsroom,” according to a BuzzFeed spokesperson.
How serious is BuzzFeed about AI? Peretti presented his vision of the future, albeit in an expanded form, that still retains the role of humans.
The creative process will become increasingly AI-assisted and technology-enabled. If the last 15 years of the internet were defined by the algorithmic feeds that curate and recommend content, the next 15 will be defined by the AI and data that help create, personalize and animate the content itself. . Our industry expands beyond AI-powered curation (feeds) to AI-powered creation (content). AI ushers in a new era of creativity. There, creative humans like us play a key role in providing ideas, cultural currency, inspiring prompts, IPs, and formats that come to life using the latest technology.
However, not everyone is convinced that AI lighting is the future. Those who already think the move to AI-generated content could be a trend along the lines of the “pivot to video” that caused so much trouble for media companies from 2015 to 2018 There is also Others compare the AI hype to the metaverse, blockchain, etc. NFTs have become very popular in recent years.
Hype aside, the potential for AI-powered automation to reduce the cost of content creation may be too tempting to completely abandon, especially if the quality of AI tools improves over time. . CNET’s recent ill-fated adventure in AI using an in-house developed AI engine (the most high-profile AI-created experiment from a major publication we know of) has so far failed. , resulting in articles full of errors and plagiarism. But even after being hit hard, CNET announced that it would “continue to embrace” AI-generated content. If the number of clicks continues to grow and it fits their business model, CNET sees no reason to change.
Whether AI tools will completely replace human journalists or simply improve productivity (in the sense of inventions like typewriters) is an open question that remains unanswered at this time. Only time will tell, as the story of generative AI continues to unfold rapidly.
