BuzzFeed Inc. said it would rely on ChatGPT creator OpenAI to enhance its quizzes and personalize some content for its audiences, becoming the latest digital publisher to embrace artificial intelligence.
In a memo to staff sent Thursday morning, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive Jonah Peretti said he intends for AI to play a larger role in the company’s editorial and business operations this year.
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BuzzFeed Inc. said it would rely on ChatGPT creator OpenAI to enhance its quizzes and personalize some content for its audiences, becoming the latest digital publisher to embrace artificial intelligence.
In a memo to staff sent Thursday morning, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive Jonah Peretti said he intends for AI to play a larger role in the company’s editorial and business operations this year.
In one instance, the company said new AI-powered quizzes would produce individual results.
For example, a quiz to create a personal romantic comedy movie pitch might ask questions like, “Pick a trope for your rom-com,” and “Tell us an endearing flaw you have.” The quiz would produce a unique, shareable write-up based on the individual’s responses, BuzzFeed said.
Mr. Peretti expects AI to assist the creative process and enhance the company’s content, while humans play the role of providing ideas, “cultural currency,” and “inspired prompts,” he wrote in his memo. In 15 years, he wrote, he expects AI and data to help “create, personalize, and animate the content itself,” rather than just curate existing content.
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BuzzFeed, which went public in late 2021 through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, last year moved to shrink its news division as it sought to make the business profitable, and said it would be doubling its creator network. The company is getting paid millions of dollars by Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. to help generate creator content for Facebook and Instagram, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
BuzzFeed shares more than doubled in value Thursday, closing at $2.09. The stock remains down by over 75% since the company went public.
BuzzFeed remains focused on human-generated journalism in its newsroom, a spokeswoman said Thursday.
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After receiving Mr. Peretti’s memo, a number of employees on Thursday expressed concerns and asked him questions on Slack about the implications of the move.
One staff member asked how Mr. Peretti planned to circumvent “inevitable legal issues” around visual work created by illustrators, photographers and art directors at the company, as well as content that is protected by U.S. copyright, according to screenshots of the Slack channel that were reviewed by the Journal.
“We’ve done experimentation in the past with AI-generative images, and we recognize these concerns and take them seriously,” Mr. Peretti wrote in response, according to the BuzzFeed spokeswoman. He also said the initial step in BuzzFeed’s plan was to use AI for text-based products.
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Other employees asked about whether the use of AI technology would lead to a reduction in workforce, and expressed concerns around fact-checking AI-generated content. In response, Mr. Peretti wrote that the tools are an opportunity to make full-time employees more efficient and creative, not a workforce reduction strategy, the spokeswoman said.
Mr. Peretti also answered staff questions during a companywide meeting earlier Thursday, the spokeswoman said.
Mr. Peretti told staff during the meeting that digital-media companies that choose to rely on AI solely to save costs and produce low-quality content were making a terrible use of the technology, according to the spokeswoman. That isn’t BuzzFeed’s approach, Mr. Peretti said, noting there were far more creative ways to use AI.
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“I think that news, for good reason, is often the most conservative when it comes to adopting new technologies,” Mr. Peretti told staff, according to the spokeswoman.
BuzzFeed’s move comes as ChatGPT, new chatbot technology from research lab OpenAI, generates buzz among consumers and businesses alike. Some publishers have said they are starting to discuss using AI technology, while others are already experimenting with it.
Digital technology publisher CNET, for example, recently ran a test using internally designed AI technology to help editors create explainers around financial-services topics. CNET’s Editor in Chief Connie Guglielmo this week said the publisher paused its test, which had led to the publication of 77 stories, after finding a number of factual errors.
Microsoft Corp. , which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, plans to incorporate artificial-intelligence tools like ChatGPT into all of its products, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said last week.
Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com