New York
CNN
—
Over the holidays, when most media executives might be looking for a reprieve from work, Jonah Peretti was online, completely immersed in experimenting with artificial intelligence.
The co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, who has always raced to test the latest technologies, was well versed in AI and predicted how it could one day revolutionize the media industry. In fact, BuzzFeed had dabbled in using it over the years.
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But Peretti, sitting in his California home in late December, began probing how the developing robotic writing technology could quickly be infused into BuzzFeed’s very DNA.
In a phone interview Thursday, Peretti said that as he and a handful of colleagues prototyped how technology could be used to improve the site’s quizzes, interactive articles and other types of content, he was really having fun. “It started to feel like we were all playing,” recalls Peretti.
This “playful work”, as he described it, quickly “lead to several Google documents full of implications of technology and how [BuzzFeed] could integrate this into our platform and how we could expand it to other formats. »
Those efforts culminated in Peretti’s official announcement on Thursday that BuzzFeed will work with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to help create content for its audience and bring artificial intelligence into the “core business.”
Peretti said he understands people might read the news and conclude that BuzzFeed is, in short, replacing humans with robots. But Peretti insisted that was not his vision for the technology, even though he predicted other companies would likely go down this dark path.
“I think there are two paths for AI in digital media,” Peretti said. “One way is the obvious way a lot of people will go – but it’s a depressing way – using technology to cut costs and spamming a bunch of lower quality SEO articles than a journalist could do , but a tenth of the cost. It’s a vision, but for me, it’s a depressing vision and a short-sighted vision because in the long run it’s not going to work.
“The other way,” Peretti continued, “which is the one I’m really excited about, is the new digital media model that’s more personalized, more creative, more dynamic – where really talented people who work in our company can use AI together and entertain and personalize more than you could ever do without AI.
Put simply, Peretti said he plans to use artificial intelligence to improve the work of his employees, not to replace them.
The example provided by the company is the BuzzFeed quiz. Typically, a human would write the questions and maybe a dozen answers that would be provided to the user based on their input. But, with AI, the staff member could write down the questions and the software could spit out a highly personalized answer for the user. In the example provided, a user would take a quick quiz and the AI would write a short RomCom using the data provided.
“We don’t need to train the AI to be as good as BuzzFeed editors, because we have BuzzFeed editors, so they can inject language, ideas, cultural currency and write them in prompts and format,” Peretti said. “And then the AI brings it together and creates new content.”
Peretti said he has no interest in using artificial intelligence to replace human journalists for writing news articles, as tech outlet CNET recently did with disastrous consequences (dozens of media articles written by the AI were riddled with errors that needed to be corrected).
“There’s the CNET path, and then there’s the path that BuzzFeed is focusing on,” Peretti said. “One is about cost and volume of content, and the other is about capacity.”
“Even though there are a lot of bad actors trying to use AI to build content farms, it won’t win out in the long run,” Peretti predicted. “I think the AI content farm model will be very depressing and dystopian.”
