Media braces for the robot era - Axios

The rapid rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT could displace dozens of media companies if they don't move quickly to adapt to a new internet reality.

Why it matters: Facebook's many pivots pushed media outlets to move their focus away from social media and toward search — but now experts predict another major disruption for publishers relying on search traffic.

"It's an undoing of the robotic behavior with which we were already committing journalism, because it's questionable whether writing about National Donut Day really served anybody," said S. Mitra Kalita, a former CNN executive who has co-founded two new local media companies, Epicenter NYC and URL Media.

• "In some ways, the work we were doing towards optimizing for SEO and trending content was robotic. Arguably, we were using what was trending on Twitter and Google to create the news agenda. What happened was a sameness across the internet."

Driving the news: BuzzFeed last week said it is using OpenAI's publicly available software, which is similar to the popular generative text site ChatGPT, to automatically publish quizzes, beginning this month.

• "To be clear, we see the breakthroughs in AI opening up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good," the company's CEO, Jonah Peretti, said in a memo to staffers.

BuzzFeed doesn't plan to use AI to write journalistic articles, which seems to be a line that most publishers ...

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