BuzzFeed disclosed Thursday that it was using AI to produce stories for the site—an admission that saw its stock price soar as investors slavered at the prospect of replacing human writers with generative content.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti revealed that while it was easy to assume that automation could make headlines, the company could be in danger of creating "fake news stories."
False news stories also get produced by high-profile outlets. Last year, the Associated Press released a report titled "Jailed and Fired For Being Pro-Fascism: A Review," which showed that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision of a Wisconsin bank that said it had paid for Nazi salutes to Nazi prisoners. At the time, The New York Times published a piece in the wake of the case, which found that the federal government had violated the Constitution and created a "reformatory body" under which employers could fire employees who opposed the state's discriminatory policies, particularly those that called for abolishing the state's requirement that an employer make "good faith efforts to avoid discriminating against non-white workers." A recent Vox article claimed, in the same vein, that there's a "new tool for employers to detect bias in job decisions" and that "more than 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies' non-discrimination policies have been influenced by data uncovered by a software program based on a statistical model, said Peter Cushing, former U.S. solicitor general and professor of international law at the Stanford
The program was set for release later this year on YouTube and also announced on its website this week that it will introduce live events where contestants will get on a "brainpower" treadmill to test their ability to do a given job on the site. The online community reacted by saying that the algorithms created by BuzzFeed were too advanced and would not be suited for the website's use, and that they'd "have to change their algorithms completely." The site has yet to decide when it plans to deploy the news algorithm.
The first and last sentences of this post were written by a human.
