New York
CNN
—
While most media executives were probably looking for a reprieve from their jobs during the holiday season, Jonah Peretti was online and fully immersed in his artificial intelligence experiments.
Co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, who has always raced to test the latest technology, he is well versed in AI and predictions about its potential to one day revolutionize the media industry. was In fact, BuzzFeed dabbled in using it for years.
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But Peretti sat at his home in California in late December and began exploring ways to quickly inject developing robotic writing technology into BuzzFeed’s very DNA.
In a phone interview Thursday, Peretti presented a prototype of how he and a handful of colleagues could use the technology to enhance the quizzes, interactive articles, and other types of content that feature on the site. “It started to feel like we were all playing together,” Peretti recalls.
That “playful work,” as he describes it, soon led to “multiple Google docs full of what technology means and how to do it. [BuzzFeed] Please let us know how we can incorporate this into our platform and extend it to other formats. ”
Those efforts culminated in Peretti’s official announcement on Thursday. BuzzFeed is working with ChatGPT’s creator, his OpenAI, to help create content for its audience and move artificial intelligence into its “core business.”
Peretti said he understands that people may read the news and conclude that BuzzFeed is essentially trying to replace humans with robots. But Peretti insisted it wasn’t his vision for the technology, even as he predicted other companies would likely follow that dark path.
“I think there are two paths for AI in digital media,” Peretti said. “One path is the obvious one that many would take, but it is the depressing one. Using technology to save money and write SEO articles of lower quality than what journalists can do. spamming a lot of, but one-tenth of that is the cost.It’s a vision, but to me it’s a depressing vision, a short-sighted vision, because it doesn’t work in the long run.”
Peretti continues: We use AI together to make it more fun and personal than we could have done without it. ”
More simply, Peretti said he envisions artificial intelligence being used to enhance employees’ jobs, rather than replace them.
An example provided by the company is the BuzzFeed quiz. Humans typically create questions and create dozens of answers that are delivered to users based on their input. But with AI, staff can write questions and software spits out highly personalized responses to users. In the provided example, the user answers a simple quiz and the AI creates a short RomCom using the provided data.
“The AI doesn’t have to be trained in the same way as BuzzFeed writers, because there are BuzzFeed writers. BuzzFeed writers can inject language, ideas, and cultural currencies and write them into prompts and formats,” he said. Peretti said. “Then AI puts it all together to create new content.”
Peretti said he has no interest in using artificial intelligence to produce news stories on behalf of human journalists, as CNET’s tech outlet has recently had disastrous results Dozens of outlet articles were filled with errors that needed to be fixed.)
“There’s a path to CNET and then there’s a path that BuzzFeed is looking at,” Peretti says. “One is about cost and amount of content, the other is about capacity.”
“Even if you have a lot of bad guys trying to build content farms with AI, you’re not going to win in the long run,” Peretti predicted. “I think the AI content farm model feels very depressing and dystopian.”