AI could replace journalists, Mathias Döpfner warns

The dramatic rise in artificial intelligence-powered technology like ChatGPT threatens to make journalists obsolete, the boss of one of the world’s largest media companies warned his staff.

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner — who heads the $7.32 billion German parent company which owns American news brands including Politico and Insider — made the shocking claim in a memo sent to employees that touted the benefits and pitfalls of AI.

“Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was — or simply replace it,” Döpfner wrote in the memo obtained by the UK-publication the Guardian.

Döpfner predicted a “revolution” where the AI tools would be more proficient than humans in the “aggregation of information.”

“Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house’s future viability,” Döpfner wrote.

“Only those who create the best original content will survive.”

Döpfner announced that the company would be making cost cuts that he hopes will advance the goal of improving earnings by around $106 million.

He pledged to his staffers that there would be no layoffs of “reporters, authors, or specialist editors,” according to the Guardian.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti circulated a memo to staffers indicating that the company would use the technology to improve quizzes by personalizing results based on a reader’s responses. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the news.

CNET, a tech-centric website, has reportedly been using AI to generate content.

Other media entities including the UK’s Daily Mirror and Daily Express have also been looking into “the potential and limitations of machine-learning such as ChatGPT,” according to Financial Times.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot created by San Francisco-based tech startup OpenAI.

According to the company, the chatbot “uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner.”

Millions of people have played with it over the past few months, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick it into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping compose an email.

All of those queries are also helping it get smarter.

The New York City Department of Education as well as the school systems in Seattle, Los Angeles, Fairfax County, Va., Montgomery County, Ala., and others have banned students from accessing ChatGPT for fear it could be used to cheat on exams.

With Post wires