I swear to the tech Gods, I haven’t opened a newsletter app or print publication this month without seeing the words AI. It really is the trade of the season, with the rise of DALL-E, the A.I. art generation tool, and now ChatGPT, which has proved to be a shockingly capable writing assistant.
It’s now official, it is infiltrating our lives. According to a Wall Street Journal report on Thursday as millennial favourite BuzzFeed has confirmed that it will use OpenAI’s technology to help create quizzes and personalised content.
It turned out to be a very smart decision for BuzzFeed, even just in terms of press. The news subsequently sent BuzzFeed’s stock soaring as much as 150% in afternoon trading before pulling back to a 110% gain, to just above $2. Earlier this week, the shares had been below $1, or down more than 90% since they started publicly trading after BuzzFeed merged with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2021.
Wall Street’s report also noted that its stock price rise is partially due to Facebook parent Meta’s announcement late Wednesday that it will pay BuzzFeed millions of dollars to push more creators to make content on Meta’s platforms. The deal is valued at nearly $10 million.
Essentially, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told employees that “the creative process will increasingly become A.I.-assisted and technology-enabled,” meaning that A.I. would help automatically create content instead of humans doing the work. “If the past 15 years of the internet have been defined by algorithmic feeds that curate and recommend content, the next 15 years will be defined by AI and data helping create, personalise, and animate the content itself,” Peretti wrote in his memo.
In regards to other publications making use of AI for content, for several months, technology news site CNET used A.I. to publish online articles—with disclosures that readers had to dig for to see—that were recently found to include inaccuracies. Last week, the outlet told employees that it would stop using the technology.
