Replace Reporters With AI? What Could Go Wrong?
BuzzFeed takes a loss to sell the Hot Ones studio and find out!
Reporters are expensive meatbags, and they complain a lot. What if you could just replace them with robots? That’s the brilliant idea media company BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti has, anyway. He is selling the farm to buy the robots!
And there’s not much of a farm. Three years ago, BuzzFeed paid $300 million for Complex Networks and First We Feast, owners of that “Hot Ones” YouTube show where celebrities like Shaquille O’Neal, John Stamos and Lorde get interviewed by an affable guy named Sean Evans, while they eat progressively spicier chicken wings, and the celebrity proclaims that the wings are indeed spicy. People like it! The show has somehow been around for an entire decade, and has 12.6 million subscribers.
Then earlier this year BuzzFeed sold some of the Complex business to ecommerce company Ntwrk for around $109 million, and laid off about 16 percent of its remaining workforce. And then last week it sold First We Feast for $82.5 million to an affiliate of Soros Fund Management. Quite the big fat loss! But it’s part of a strategy, you see, to get rid of “lower-margin content products” in favor of “high-margin, tech-enabled revenue lines.”
Or as the BuzzFeed CEO put it, in business-speak: “In the coming years, we will continue to invest in our most scalable and tech enabled services, launching new AI-powered interactive experiences, and delivering for our loyal audience and business partners.” Translation, robots won’t demand severance pay or file for unemployment, and the audience won’t mind.
In the worst kind of timing, the next day the BBC’s Apple AI sent out a news alert falsely notifying “Apple Intelligence”-enabled iOS 18.1 iPhones that shooting suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself. (He had not.) You would think AI would at least be able to summarize existing news stories without completely making things up, but the technology, it seems, is not there yet. It can’t even reliably draw people and figure out how many fingers they have. And have you ever tried to write porn on ChatGPT? It really does not understand how human bodies work. We hear. So entire stories? Good luck with that.
Red Ventures’s technology website CNET already tried robot reporters, and what they got was plagiarism and stories full of errors. AI can’t tell if the information it’s scraping is fact or fiction. It has no ability to verify information, or ring up a source for a quote (yet). It can’t run down to the courthouse to watch a trial, or decide what’s newsworthy and what is not, or slip in cute little dick jokes! All it can do is generate some text based on the patterns it was trained on. And then there’s the plagiarism problem: AI steals and regurgitates what humans have written, that’s what it does. So if AI requires an editor to insert quotes, check facts, vet a story for any plagiarism and put in the dick jokes, at what point is any of this saving time and money over just hiring a reporter to write things in the first place?
But, BuzzFeed is a public company, and it’s gotta do something to try to keep itself alive for its last remaining shareholders. The stock has been steadily sinking, down more than 35 percent since it went public in 2021. And shareholders demand public companies constantly churn out increasing profits. The only way to do that is to make more stuff, faster, at a lower cost. In BuzzFeed’s case, the “stuff” is newsy listicles and quizzes: 40 gifts parents will love! Take a food quiz to see if you’re a You’re a Glinda or an Elphaba! Or there’s “43 Things That’ll Make Laundry Day Run A Little More Smoothly.” (Really, 43? And people are spending a whole day on laundry?) You don’t need the second coming of Ida B. Wells to churn out this slop, and calling it “reporting” is generous. Is it better than computer-generated content? We shall see.
And what a sad state of affairs! The web site once known for publishing the Steele dossier, Trump Tower documents and even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for a series on the mass detention of Uyghur Muslims by China degraded to this. It shut down its actual news division in 2023, after rounds of buyouts and layoffs, and there they are.
So now instead of Pulitzers or Hot Wing Shows it shall make AI slop, as if the world didn’t already have enough. The slop has taken over Facebook feeds with generated pictures of Jesuses, salads, and Pope Francis in a puffer coat. And Xitter, obviously, where porn bots and crypto bots and scam bots demand attention. The slop is even oozing into publishing, where acquisition editors are being swarmed by submissions from people who typed “ChatGPT, write a 500-page romance novel” or “ChatGPT, write a book about fibromyalgia.” The slop can now even call people on the phone, pretending to be a loved one in distress, asking for money.
It’s scary shit, and sad, but what can you do? Definitely get a code word to use with family, in case some scammer calls with a fake kidnapping. Maybe stay off of the social media, or at least if you see the pope in a puffer jacket, or Trump in hip waders, consider that that’s not him.
And of course donate to Wonkette, which is still tappedty-tapped by real humans, flawed and expensive as they may be, no robots allowed!
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[New York Magazine / Gizmodo / The Desk / New York Times archive link / NPR / Marketing Brew / Washington Post archive link]
As a retired journalist, I've been out of the business for long enough that it would be extremely difficult for me to report on national news as I did in the 80's, 90's and 00's. That's because I don't know anybody anymore. And A1 doesn't now and never did know anyone. AI can't go out for beer with a senator or stand on the street corner in a blizzard waiting for the Secretary of Labor to walk out of his building just to ask one little question, or forget she was covering a Marine One departure from the White House and wore a skirt. Damn those fucking choppers. A1 can't produce an interview with the Secretary of the Interior while using his bathroom as the control room and sitting on his toilet because you have to sit somewhere. And it can't do another show with the crown prince of Jordan from the bed in the presidential suite of the Watergate Hotel. A1 will never spend a day with Daniel Schorr and Molly Ivins swapping tales while driving across Texas. And A1 will never hang out with Glenn Close and the President of Bosnia, drinking red wine and smoking the president's cigarettes. A1 will never have great stories about its experience reporting on the big events of the day because it ain't a reporter and never will be.
Trumpism + unchecked AI. What could possibly go wrong?