BuzzFeed’s CEO wants artificial intelligence to play a bigger role in creating content for the sites. For example, the medium is thinking of quizzes that can write personalized text with the help of AI.
Artificial intelligence should play a greater role on both the content side and the business side, BuzzFeeds CEO Jonah Peretti recently said in a staff memo. That memo is viewed by The Wall Street Journal. In it, Peretti says he wants to use OpenAI. Artificial intelligence should support the creative process, but people should still provide ideas, cultural currency‘ and inspiration.
A concrete example is quizzes on buzzfeed.com, which users can ask about their “touching weaknesses” or what kind of rom-com they’d like to make. The quiz would then use AI to create a unique, personalized text based on the user’s answers.
Peretti expects that the role of artificial intelligence will only grow and that AI can help in fifteen years in creating, personalizing and animating content. A spokesperson emphasizes that the company remains focused on news made by people.
According to the newspaper, BuzzFeed employees were concerned about the announcement and wondered, among other things, about copyright if OpenAI is based on take pictures of other people’s work. Peretti said he acknowledged that concern. That’s why BuzzFeed first mainly looks at text with AI. Others questioned whether this would mean job cuts. Peretti said the AI would help with employee efficiency and creativity and that the goal is not to take over people’s jobs.
The BuzzFeed company consists of the websites buzzfeed.com and buzzfeednews.com . The latter is more focused on investigative journalism than the regular buzz feed. Recently, CNET came under fire for its use of AI, because the company was not transparent about this and also did not properly check the articles. This week, the company announced stop using AI for now to write articles. CNET did use a different strategy than what BuzzFeed is now proposing. CNET had AI write full articles and claimed they were checked afterwards. BuzzFeed doesn’t seem to want to do this for news articles yet.
