Last week, BuzzFeed nuked its entire newsroom, laying off an already significantly reduced team that had never been quite the same since the company forced out droves of investigative and politics reporters last March. And while you certainly couldn’t call this the first major newsroom layoff in history, it did feel unique for one particular reason.
In an email that company CEO Jonah Peretti sent to his soon-to-be-jobless staff, he mentioned that BuzzFeed would now focus on “increasing speed and effectiveness” while also pivoting to “bring AI enhancements to every aspect of our sales process.” Whatever Peretti thinks that means, it sure sounds like the company has decided that automated content generation is cheaper and more profitable than hiring actual journalists to report the news.
If you work in the news business, that should clearly worry you—a lot—because BuzzFeed isn’t the only one that seems to be following this road map.
Insider, which recently announced that it would be piloting a trial AI program for content generation, revealed—on the same day that BuzzFeed News died—that it would be laying off 10 percent of its staff. This followed on the heels of similar news from tech outlet CNET, which—after secretly launching an AI content generator last year—laid off 10 percent of its staff in March. CNET was infamously caught using its AI program to pen droves of error-ridden explainers at the behest of its owner, media firm Red Ventures. At the time of the layoffs, CNET claimed—unconvincingly—that the cuts had nothing to do with its AI use. CNET’s editor-in-chief became its “senior vice president of AI content strategy.”
Big selection, low pricesWayfair's two-day sale lets you peruse sitewide categories with up to 80% off.
The media industry is clearly undergoing some changes—and many of those changes are tied to the emergent field of “generative AI.” Said field—which leapt onto the global stage last November with the launch of ChatGPT—utilizes new data-intensive technologies to generate human-like text and visuals, and its applications and products are swiftly reshaping the very structure of our digital economy.
The news industry is clearly scrambling to take advantage of that restructuring the best that it can. During the earnings calls of several major media companies late last year, executives expressed a desire to use AI to operate newsrooms in leaner, more flexible ways. In calls with Buzzfeed Inc., as well as with newspaper giants Gannett and Dotdash Meredith, and with The Arena Group (which owns Sports Illustrated, Men’s Journal, and a number of other brands), top corporate officials were quick to cite evolving business strategies. The CFO of Gannett, Doug Horne, told investors that he thought AI could be used to “create efficiencies” that would ultimately help the company to save “at least $220 million” a year. Buzzfeed, meanwhile, told investors that AI would be transitioning “from an R&D stage to [become] part of” the company’s “core business.” The Arena Group’s CEO Ross Levinsohn explained that AI tools had already spawned “productivity improvements.”
While executives seem to have steered clear of explicitly mentioning layoffs, the tenor of the conversation in the industry is not so hard to grasp.
“At the heart of the line of questions we’ve heard across numerous calls is how automation can replace people, and what that ultimately means for revenue… and cash flow,” Daniel Kurnos, a media analyst with the investment banking firm The Benchmark Company, previously told Digiday. “We’ve heard several executives discuss cautious testing phases, but I think everyone is waiting to see how the tech evolves before fully committing one way or the other.”
In short: if you work in the news media, it wouldn’t be crazy for you to feel like you’ve just been placed on an endangered species list. Automation of a sort we’ve never witnessed before is now coming for whole new sectors of the global economy, and if you value your job, it may be that “generative AI” ends up causing you a lot more problems than it solves.
It’s not as if there haven’t been signs that things were trending in this direction.
Since it started, generative AI’s biggest proponents have pitched it as a cost saver—a way for companies to cut down on “labor intensive” processes, as well as reduce spending, optimize worker “efficiency” and “maximize ROI.” Prognosticators haven’t been shy about the fact that a lot of this corporate-speak is really just code for giving workers the boot. A recent report from the vampire squid itself, Goldman Sachs, notes that AI automation could “impact” as much as 25 percent of the labor force in both the U.S. and Europe in the years to come. Other projections, like one from consulting giant McKinsey, estimate a total displacement of roughly 15 percent of the global workforce, or some 400 million people.
You might find these predictions horrifying but, to the C-Suite, it’s clearly a positive turn of events: Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, recently told the Financial Times that he thought it was “a good thing” that AI will replace workers because such disruption will help bolster the unemployment rate in the U.S.—thus keeping things nice and flexible for corporations. Of course, the other reason that people like Krishna are excited about AI is that it promises to make them even richer than they already are. A recent report from Grand View Research suggests that while AI will disrupt certain sectors of workers, it’s also projected to bring in billions in new corporate revenue over the next decade. With all that in mind, it’s hard not to feel that AI tools are—from a corporate perspective, at least—largely just a way to hike profits by automating labor.
Sam Altman, CEO of the startup OpenAI which spawned the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has spent years writing about AI’s hugely disruptive potential on his personal blog, and so seems to have been quite ready to respond to critics when murmurs about “job loss” and “displacement” started cropping up online not long after his product’s launch. In December, Altman preempted complaints from the rank and file about AI’s job-killing potential, tweeting out what seemed like a friendly missive about the world to come:
“good skills for the future: adaptability and resilience. i think these are learnable! hard to answer the question of ‘what jobs will be safe’, but humans always find new things to do, and the future will likely be amazing. embracing change will be important.”
Tech moguls love to say stuff like this, and you can totally see why: in their eyes, the future belongs to them. I’m sure things will be totally amazing for Sam—who is so rich that he never has to work again and can afford to waste tens of millions of dollars on dubious investments—like life-extension startups. Financial opulence of that sort tends to make a guy optimistic about the future.
For the rest of us, though, the truth is this: generative AI is coming for your job. Maybe it’s not coming tomorrow, maybe it’s not coming next year, but rest assured, it’s coming.
The outlook is especially precarious for journalists, whose industry is threatened by an ever accelerating economic crisis.
The complicated financial ecosystem in which the news business finds itself these days means that there’s no guarantee that traditional forms of reporting will be protected amidst broader technological disruptions. The alliance between private equity and journalism, for instance, has never been a happy one—and it could get a whole lot less happy soon. For lack of a viable alternative financial model, newsrooms have latched onto this money-grubbing industry, which is populated by firms that see journalists less as achievers of a public good than as a quick route to profits. A 2022 study from NYU showed that private equity’s management of local newspapers had resulted in an “unambiguously negative” impact on the communities they were supposed to serve. News coverage devolved from more local-specific coverage to national news that was easier to syndicate. The report states that this coverage shift resulted in declines in “voter knowledge of local policy issues and participation in the political process” and generally contributed to a less educated (and less involved) electorate.
Now that new automation tools appear to offer a quicker way for firms to get the same product without paying actual human journalists, it seems almost inevitable that—when it comes to content quality—they’ll continue a veritable race to the bottom in an effort to chase bigger and bigger profits.
Journalists’ work, meanwhile, threatens to be transmogrified into little more than the stultifying task of editing an algorithm’s output. That certainly seems to be what’s in store for whoever answers this job posting from the Gannett-owned USA Today Network, which says it is currently in the market for “forward-thinking journalists passionate about using new technology to fuel quality journalism in service to local news.” Among these lucky new employees’ duties will be the responsibility of “obtaining, cleaning and automating data in preparation for publication,” presumably from some ChatGPT-type generator.
It’s not just journalists and media professionals that are under threat here. A slew of assessments have shown that many different industries could soon be subjected to massive disruptions as the result of automation. This is where the threat of AI get decidedly more existential—and where the conversation gets a whol Source: Gizmodo