On the day that Jonah Peretti, the C.E.O. of BuzzFeed, announced that he was closing BuzzFeed News, he held a video all-hands meeting with the site's staff. "People always yell at Jonah in meetings," Katie Notopoulos, a tech reporter, said, "but I've seen worse." Peretti had already sent the attendees a memo acknowledging the bad moves that had led up to this moment. "I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much," he had written. "This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn't provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media."

For every problem you can think of, someone is out there pitching a solution that involves artificial intelligence. AI could help solve such intractable problems as climate change and dangerous work conditions, the technology's most eager boosters promise. It could even fix the much-maligned "Game of Thrones" finale, if you believe one of the industry's most powerful proponents and a featured speaker at this month's South by Southwest conference. "Imagine if you could ask your AI to make a new ending that goes a different way," said Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, the research group behind the conversation software ChatGPT and the image-generation module DALL-E. "Maybe even put yourself in there as a main character or something, having interactive experiences."

After dozens of employees were laid off, online publisher BuzzFeed, known for its pop culture articles, quizzes and "listicles", announced that it would start using artificial intelligence (AI) to write its content. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, will be employed for the initiative and will create custom-made quizzes. According to a memo to staff from CEO Jonah Peretti, he intends to increase AI across BuzzFeed's editorial output and business operations as of this year. Peretti relayed his expectations of AI to improve creativity and content, but humans would still have their role in providing "cultural currency" and "inspired prompts". He set a timeline of 15 years for AI to "create, personalize, and animate the content itself".

BuzzFeed's stock soared more than 200% on Thursday after the company revealed that they will be using A.I. instead of writers to create content. CEO Jonah Peretti sent an email--which was reviewed by Wall Street Journal--to the online media company's staff stating that BuzzFeed will become the "premiere platform for A.I.-created content." In addition to Peretti's vow to invest heavily in A.I. to create content, WSJ also reported a multi-million dollar deal between BuzzFeed and Facebook parent company Meta, in which the company would generate content for Facebook and Instagram. Soon after, BuzzFeed shares rose to $2.88, its highest in seven months, before settling for the day at $2.09, still an increase of 120% and a gain of $156 million. While the jump in share prices is good news for the company, the stock is still down 80% since it went public in December 2021.

One might assume that when your boss finally comes to tell you that the robots are here to do your job, he won't also point out with enthusiasm that they're going to do it 10 times better than you did. Alas, this was not the case at BuzzFeed. Yesterday, at a virtual all-hands meeting, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti had some news to discuss about the automated future of media. The brand, known for massively viral stories aggregated from social media and being the most notable progenitor of what some might call clickbait, would begin publishing content generated by artificial-intelligence programs. In other words: Robots would help make BuzzFeed posts. "When you see this work in action it is pretty amazing," Peretti had promised employees in a memo earlier in the day.

CNet's AI SNFAU turned out to be merely the first pebble kicked down the slippery slope. In a Thursday morning internal memo acquired by the Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti announced plans to embrace AI in both editorial and business operations and utilize text generation systems similar to CNet's to produce, for example, the memeable quizzes that originally built Buzzfeed's following. Such AI-powered quizzes could provide more personalized answers based on the user's more specific responses rather than based on a score range or ranked choice system like they are today. Peretti envisions AI not only producing content on its own but drawing inspiration from human writers. We squishy meat sacks would serve as idea sources for AI text generators, or as Peretti described members of his own species, "cultural currency" and "inspired prompts."

The Journalism AI report is based on a survey of 71 news organisations in 32 different countries regarding artificial intelligence and associated technologies. A wide range of journalists working with AI answered questions about their understanding of AI, how it was used in their newsrooms, and their views on the wider potential and risks for the news industry. What emerges from this research is that artificial intelligence (AI) is a significant part of journalism already but it is unevenly distributed. AI is giving journalists more power, but with that comes editorial and ethical responsibilities. The future impact of AI is uncertain but it has the potential for wide-ranging and profound influence on how journalism is made and consumed.

"We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time -- even if they would never say those things," says "Obama," his lips moving in perfect sync with his words as they become increasingly bizarre. "So, for instance, they could have me say things like, I don't know, [Black Panther's] Killmonger was right! Or Ben Carson is in the sunken place! Or, how'bout this: Simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit." As the video soon reveals, the man speaking is not the former commander-in-chief, but rather Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele with a warning for viewers about trusting material they encounter online.