On Thursday, digital media house BuzzFeed announced that it would work with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, to enhance its quizzes and tailor some content for its audiences. With this move, BuzzFeed becomes the latest addition to digital publishers like CNET turning to AI to create or enhance its content, this however, has also raised concerns among the employees if they would be losing their jobs with the company intending to rely on AI.
In a memo to employees, Jonah Peretti, the company’s co-founder and chief executive stated that this year, artificial intelligence will play a major role in BuzzFeed’s editorial and business operations.
Peretti has reportedly said that OpenAI’s software will be used for the creation of quizzes to produce individual results. While Peretti expects AI to support the creative process and enhance the company’s content, with humans providing ideas, “inspired prompts” and “cultural currency”, the employees have raised concerns over the implications of this move to rely on AI after receiving the memo on Thursday.
As per a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report, one of the employees inquired about Peretti’s plans for countering “inevitable legal issues” involving the company’s visual work produced by illustrators, photographers, and art directors as well as content covered by U.S. copyright.
Responding to this on Slack, CEO Peretti replied, “We’ve experimented with AI-generative images in the past, and we recognize these concerns and take them seriously,” a BuzzFeed spokeswoman told WSJ.
Many employees also voiced concerns about fact-checking AI-generated content and questioned whether the use of AI technology would result in a decrease in the number of employees. In response, Peretti wrote that the tools are an opportunity to make full-time employees more productive and creative, not a strategy for workforce reduction.
Following the announcement, BuzzFeed’s stocks skyrocketed by 150% on Thursday to more than $2 a share.
About ChatGPT
San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI Inc created ChatGPT. It is a non-profit parent company of the for-profit OpenAI LP. The company is best known for DALL-E, a deep-learning model for generating images from text-based instructions. Microsoft is a partner and investor in the company. OpenAI and Microsoft together have developed the Azure AI Platform.
