this caused an uproar Washington Post’s The launch of an AI-generated podcast has gone into one ear of the newspaper’s leadership and out the other, which is not too dissimilar to what might happen to anyone who listens to someone who is trying to spread this nonsense.
On Monday, the Jeff Bezos-owned publication doubled down on its personal podcast push, sidestepping criticism from readers and its own journalists.
“This is how products are built and developed in the digital age: ideation, research, design and prototyping, development and then beta,” A. WaPo spokesperson told The Wrap, “Only if they prove successful for the customer are they launched. As clearly stated on Your Personal Podcast, it is currently in beta.”
WaPo launched its “Your Personal Podcast” feature last week, sparking immediate discontent within its ranks. Employees were angry over the podcast AI’s invention of quotes and misrepresentations, semaphore informed Fridays, and sometimes even editorials on stories. Some employees questioned the technology’s seemingly nonexistent guardrails, Situation informedWhile another described it as a “complete disaster”.
Further underscoring the staggering incompetence in performance, follow up reporting From semaphore revealed it WaPo It conducted its own tests before launching which revealed that up to 84 percent of AI-generated podcast scripts did not meet the newspaper’s standards – and were therefore unpublished.
There’s a significant gap between a company’s newsroom and its product team in charge of AI rollouts. The podcast’s product team views errors as a normal part of rolling out a new and still experimental feature, and said it will “iterate through remaining issues.”
Similar jargon was also displayed in the newspaper’s statement The WrapAnd it is equally telling and troubling that such tech-minded rhetoric is being deployed in the context of journalism. AI may not be doing the work of an actual journalist, but it is playing the role of packaging news to the audience. Would a human news anchor be given this much leeway, and allowed to mess up more details than he or she knows right as he or she is learning on the job, or in technical language, “repeating through it”?
Post It’s not the only newsroom to deploy AI. new York Times uses it to help generate headlines, and Bloomberg’s The website features an AI that produces summaries of its articles. Many publications have some type of trained AI chatbot in their archives. But WaPo has been particularly AI-evangelistic, reflecting its transformation under Jeff Bezos’ ownership. Along with deploying AI summaries and AI chatbots, it also introduced plans to let non-professional writers submit articles written with AI.
However, it seems that the AI podcast has really upset its staff.
“It’s really surprising that this was allowed to go ahead,” said one. WaPo Editors raged on Slack, per semaphore“I never imagined this Washington Post Will knowingly distort its journalism and then broadcast these errors to our audience at large.
The editor said, “If we were serious, we would remove this tool immediately.”
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