A future without people: Chatbots will make the news
German publishing group Axel Springer says artificial intelligence can replace journalists. Media company owner Politico urges focus on investigative journalism and original commentary as the company prepares to cut jobs at German newspapers Die Welt and Bild.
Journalists risk being replaced by AI systems like ChatGPT, said Axel Springer, CEO of German media group.< /p>
According to The Guardian, the forecast was made as the publisher sought to increase the revenue of the German newspapers Bild and Die Welt and move towards becoming a «pure digital media company». Job cuts lie ahead, the statement said, as automation and artificial intelligence increasingly render many of the jobs that supported their journalism production unnecessary.
«AI has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was, or simply replace it,» CEO Matthias Depfner said in an internal letter to employees.
According to him, AI tools, such as the popular ChatGPT chatbot promises a «revolution» in the field of information and will soon be better at «aggregating information» than human journalists.
“Understanding this change is critical to the publisher's future viability,” Depfner said. – Only those who create the best original content will survive.
The Axel Springer Group did not specify how many of its employees could be cut, but promised that the number of «reporters, authors or specialist editors would not be cut.»
In his letter to staff, Matthias Depfner said that the media should focus on investigative journalism and original commentary, while unraveling the «true motives» events will remain the work of journalists.
Axel Springer is not the first news publisher to use artificial intelligence to create their content. In January, news media company BuzzFeed announced that it plans to use artificial intelligence to «improve» content and online quizzes.
The publisher of the British newspapers Daily Mirror and Daily Express is also exploring the use of artificial intelligence, setting up a task force to explore «the potential and limitations of machine learning like ChatGPT», the group's chief executive told the Financial Times.
Since its launch Last November, chatbot ChatGPT amassed over 100 million users and accelerated a long-predicted tally of whether AI could cut some jobs.
The program can generate very complex texts based on simple user prompts, creating anything from essays and job applications to poetry and fiction. ChatGPT is a wide language model that is trained by loading billions of words of everyday text into the system from all over the internet. He then uses all this material to predict words and sentences in certain sequences.
However, the accuracy of his answers has been questioned. Australian scientists have found examples of a system that fabricates links from websites and links to fake quotes, notes The Guardian.
The use of artificial intelligence in journalism has also proven controversial.
The technical web is reported to The CNET site uses an artificial intelligence tool to generate articles that are later scanned by human editors for accuracy before publication. In January, the website acknowledged that the program had some limitations after a report from tech news site Futurism showed that more than half of the stories created with AI tools had to be edited due to errors.