Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a robot typewriter-journalist hard at work. (credit: Ars Technica)
On Thursday, an internal memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal revealed that BuzzFeed is planning to use ChatGPT-style text synthesis technology from OpenAI to create individualized quizzes and potentially other content in the future. After the news hit, BuzzFeed’s stock rose 200 percent. On Friday, BuzzFeed formally announced the move in a post on its site.
“In 2023, you’ll see AI inspired content move from an R&D stage to part of our core business, enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming, and personalizing our content for our audience,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in a memo to employees, according to Reuters. A similar statement appeared on the BuzzFeed site.
The move comes as the buzz around OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model reaches a fever pitch in the tech sector, inspiring more investment from Microsoft and reactive moves from Google. ChatGPT’s underlying model, GPT-3, uses its statistical “knowledge” of millions of books and articles to generate coherent text in numerous styles, with results that read very close to human writing, depending on the topic. GPT-3 works by attempting to predict the most likely next words in a sequence (called a “prompt”) provided by the user.