The folks over at the Washington Post have had a rough week, losing more than 250,000 subscribers after owner Jeff Bezos ordered the newspaper to not make an endorsement in the 2024 election. But hey, look over there, it’s a shiny new AI chatbot! “Ask The Post AI,” as it’s aptly called, is a new chatbot from the Post that returns AI-generated answers to questions based on the newspaper’s back catalog of stories published since 2016. For instance, if you ask it how many homes were damaged in Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire, it returns a response saying, “The Marshall Fire in Louisville, Colorado, in December 2021 destroyed more than 1,000 homes, making it the most destructive blaze in the state’s history.
” That is correct! Below the answer are links to the Post’s related stories that it culled the information from. “Generative AI and the rise of conversational formats are opportunities for us to draw upon our long legacy of fact-based, thoroughly reported journalism to delight and inform readers in new ways,” the Post said in an announcement . Media companies have been looking for ways to protect themselves against the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, which could threaten their businesses if people use chatbots to learn about news events rather than going to news websites directly.
Some outlets have begun partnering with AI companies to receive some compensation in exchange for using their work as training data. Others have instead been suing to stop the un.