What Buzzfeed's Decision to Draw Upon Aritificial Intelligence Could Signal for Journalists
The artificial intelligence (AI) industry has been growing at a rate faster than experts once believed was possible. Spending on AI software is expected to grow 18 percent in just the next three years, which is faster than any other software industry is gaining momentum. And the technology is going to see applications that most who have been following the growth and development of AI wouldn’t expect.
One such use: a staff memo leaked from Buzzfeed revealed that the media giant was going to draw upon OpenAI (the same source material for the open Beta ChatGPT) to assist in authoring its infamous quizzes. The goal of using AI for these quizzes is to provide more personalized experiences to readers: for example, if a reader is taking a quiz meant to create a fantasy version of their lives as a romantic comedy, the open source AI may ask readers for more personal and open-ended essay-like answers, such as “name your perfect romantic moment.” Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti says that he hopes advancements in AI over the next 15 years will be able to “create, personalize, and animate the content itself.”
After Buzzfeed went public in 2021, it began downsizing its news output and opportunities for legitimate journalism. A major revenue source for Buzzfeed is Facebook’s parent company Meta, which is paying several millions of dollars into the Buzzfeed engine to generate clickable content for Facebook (and for the Facebook metaverse as a whole). Buzzfeed’s shares more than doubled just last week.
This news has left a particularly poor taste in both journalists and tech workers’ mouths as Silicon Valley has announced record-breaking layoffs. The situation is so severe that several workers on HB1 visas were laid off and forced to leave the country with little to no time to get affairs in order.
Creating fewer opportunities for humans to participate in yet another media and tech giant company lays a plan for poor business, said Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford’s School Of Business. “Oftentimes, companies don’t have a cost problem,” Pfeffer said. “They have a revenue problem. And cutting employees will not increase your revenue. It will probably decrease it.”
In fact, there is little empirical evidence to support cutting jobs internally does anything to help that company’s issues in the face of an “unusual and uncertain macroeconomic environment,” as Amazon said in its statements announcing well over 18,000 jobs would be cut. Buzzfeed itself just laid off 12 percent of its employees in 2022. When it announced its ambition to include AI in future quizzes, stock shares jumped up 150%.
AI is not a complete technology without flaws. News outlet CNET employed AI to generate news articles only to find a fair amount of mistakes throughout the content it generated. CNET’s editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo, in an editorial reflection on CNET’s trial period, said the company had used an internal engine rather than the open source OpenAI as its trial. “In November, one of our editorial teams, CNET Money, launched a test using an internally designed AI engine – not ChatGPT – to help editors create a set of basic explainers around financial services topics,” she wrote.
“We started small and published 77 short stories using the tool, about 1% of the total content published on our site during the same period. Editors generated the outlines for the stories first, then expanded, added to and edited the AI drafts before publishing. After one of the AI-assisted stories was cited, rightly, for factual errors, the CNET Money editorial team did a full audit.”
Upon their audit, the CNET Money team found that several pieces required correction and decided to hit pause on creating new AI-generated media for a while: “As always when we find errors, we've corrected these stories, with an editors' note explaining what was changed. We've paused and will restart using the AI tool when we feel confident the tool and our editorial processes will prevent both human and AI errors.”
Buzzfeed has a way to go before making their AI-quiz technology a reality, but a rise in AI against a landscape of layoffs for tech workers is a recipe for AI anxiety except that humans are making the choice to replace other humans with artificial intelligence. And as the functionality of AI grows, jobs in companies like Buzzfeed and CNET may shrink for both journalists and technicians alike–something to keep in mind throughout the 2020s as this technology develops.
