Pivot to ChatGPT? BuzzFeed preps for AI-written content while CNET fumbles

On Thursday, an inner memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal revealed that BuzzFeed is planning to make use of ChatGPT-style textual content synthesis know-how from OpenAI to create individualized quizzes and doubtlessly different content material sooner or later. After the information hit, BuzzFeed’s inventory rose 200 percent. On Friday, BuzzFeed formally announced the transfer in a publish on its website.

“In 2023, you will see AI impressed content material transfer from an R&D stage to a part of our core enterprise, enhancing the quiz expertise, informing our brainstorming, and personalizing our content material for our viewers,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in a memo to workers, according to Reuters. An identical assertion appeared on the BuzzFeed website.

The transfer comes as the thrill round OpenAI’s ChatGPT language mannequin reaches a fever pitch within the tech sector, inspiring extra investment from Microsoft and reactive moves from Google. ChatGPT’s underlying mannequin, GPT-3, makes use of its statistical “information” of hundreds of thousands of books and articles to generate coherent textual content in quite a few types, with outcomes that learn very near human writing, relying on the subject. GPT-3 works by trying to foretell the almost definitely subsequent phrases in a sequence (referred to as a “immediate”) supplied by the consumer.

Particularly, BuzzFeed told Reuters that it’s going to not make the most of ChatGPT itself, however as an alternative will craft a customized implementation based mostly on OpenAI’s GPT-3 know-how: “We’re not utilizing ChatGPT—we’re utilizing OpenAI’s publicly accessible API (software programming interface).”

In gentle of latest information that CNET has been publishing AI-written articles (inflicting an ongoing controversy coated properly by Futurism and The Verge), some worry that the transfer from BuzzFeed might sign a brand new pattern in media towards counting on content material produced by machines as an alternative of human writers, particularly within the wake of a 12 percent cut in BuzzFeed’s employees late final 12 months. The Wall Road Journal reports that “BuzzFeed stays targeted on human-generated journalism in its newsroom,” in line with a BuzzFeed spokesperson.

Simply how critical is BuzzFeed about AI? Peretti laid out his imaginative and prescient, which nonetheless leaves a job for people sooner or later, albeit in an augmented trend:

The inventive course of will more and more turn into AI-assisted and technology-enabled. If the previous 15 years of the web have been outlined by algorithmic feeds that curate and advocate content material, the following 15 years will likely be outlined by AI and information serving to create, personalize, and animate the content material itself. Our business will develop past AI-powered curation (feeds), to AI-powered creation (content material). AI opens up a brand new period of creativity, the place inventive people like us play a key position offering the concepts, cultural foreign money, impressed prompts, IP, and codecs that come to life utilizing the most recent applied sciences.

Not everyone seems to be satisfied that AI writing is the long run, nonetheless. Some already suppose that the transfer towards AI-generated content material may very well be a fad within the vein of the “pivot to video” motion that induced a lot trouble for media firms between 2015 and 2018. Others compare AI hype to the metaverse, blockchain, and NFT crazes lately.

Hype apart, it is doable that the prospect of AI-powered automation decreasing the price of content material creation could also be too attractive to ever abandon fully, particularly if AI instruments enhance in high quality over time. CNET’s latest misadventure in AI utilizing an internally developed AI engine—essentially the most high-profile AI-authored experiment from a serious publication that we all know of—has up to now been a failure, leading to articles stuffed with errors and plagiarism. However even after appreciable blowback, CNET announced it might “proceed embracing” AI-authored content material. If the clicks maintain coming and it suits its enterprise mannequin, CNET sees no motive to alter.

Whether or not AI instruments will ever fully exchange human journalists or merely enhance their productiveness (within the vein of an invention just like the typewriter) is an open query that we won’t reply for the time being. Solely time will inform because the story of generative AI continues to quickly unfold.