Robot Content Factories? BuzzFeed To Use ChatGPT Creator OpenAI To Help Create Quizzes, Other Content
BuzzFeed is joining the list of digital publishers to embrace artificial intelligence, its founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said in a recent memo to staff. It will partner with ChatGPT creator Open AI to make the move.
On Thursday, Jan. 26, the Wall Street Journal reported it obtained an internal memo from Peretti to BuzzFeed staff that detailed how the company plans to use AI in editorial and business operations.
After receiving the memo, some employees expressed concerns, including whether the decision would lead to a reduction in the workforce and how Peretti planned to avoid “inevitable legal issues” that may arise around the work of creatives at the company and that which is copywritten.
Peretti said BuzzFeed would use AI to generate content like personalized quizzes and low-level content. He assured his staffers the technology was not a replacement for them as valuable team members and told the public that human beings would still write high-level news articles.
“To be clear, we see the breakthroughs in AI opening up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good,” Peretti said.
In his response to the employee who asked about legal issues, Peretti said, “We’ve done experimentation in the past with AI-generative images, and we recognize these concerns and take them seriously.”
Peretti also spoke directly to the public about the new direction the online media giant is taking in a blog post titled “Our Way Forward.”
“Over the next three years, the future of digital media will be defined by two major trends: creators, and AI. We will help shape these trends to create massive value for our audience, our employees, and our shareholders,” Peretti wrote.
“The creative process will increasingly become AI-assisted and technology-enabled,” Peretti continued. “AI opens up a new era of creativity, where creative humans like us play a key role providing the ideas, cultural currency, inspired prompts, IP, and formats that come to life using the newest technologies.”
ChatGPT has people across the globe in awe of its capability to use its extensive library to write text similar to humans. Microsoft invested $10 billion into Open AI as a result of how the technology is being received.
Since news of its partnership with OpenAI, and a recently announced one with Meta, BuzzFeed’s stock has surged. It went from being down to a penny stock to increase over 200 percent.
