Job-destroying AI is already a reality. But for once, it is the executives who made the decision to use it who could pay the price.
At the beginning of the year, BuzzFeed followed the trend of almost all tech companies, laying off hundreds of employees. For many of them, the replacement seemed ready in the form of the emergence of a technology you may have heard of, artificial intelligence. If the news of the use of AI by BuzzFeed initially pleased its investors, by quadrupling the value of its shares, they have had plenty of time to change their minds since.
And in fact, it turns out that the quizzes automatically generated by BuzzFeed did not really meet with the expected success, plunging the value of the company to its lowest level since its IPO. If AI is not the only reason behind the endless fall of BuzzFeedshe certainly didn’t slow her down.
Perhaps tests should have been done first.
As every time a boss announces his intention to integrate artificial intelligence into his products, the CEO of BuzzFeed Jonah Peretti initially presented this change as a tool to serve his employees. And as always, many of them were finally invited to pack their boxes.
Quickly, the AI began producing an infinite number of quizzes (which Katy Perry song or which kebab sauce are you?), without salary or intention to unionize, a boon for the boss. But, in addition to these overtly AI-written reviews, the site has also generated countless other mediocre, repetitive articles and low-quality travel guides.
Considering the average time spent by users on the posts thus generated, however, it seems that they are more interested in them than those written by humans. At least that’s Peretti’s version, who forgets to mention that this average time includes the fact that users must fill out prompts themselves to get results from the AI, which takes several minutes.
But the AI fever is already starting to subside, as is the stock price of BuzzFeed which, at 0.31 dollars while it was approaching 4 dollars after the announcement of the integration of AI, has never been so low. To the point that if the company fails to rectify its situation by the end of the year, it could simply exit the Nasdaq index.
AI, the final nail in the coffin of BuzzFeed
To be honest, the fall of BuzzFeed is not due to AI. Not only that, in any case, because its valuation has almost only seen a decline since the company went public in 2021. It has had to manage the drop in advertising revenues on the Internet in 2022, notably at issue in the gap of 200 million dollars between its revenues and its forecasts for this year. And even before that, it suffered like all entertainment sites from changes in social media algorithms over which it has no control and which can divide its audience overnight.
The AI certainly did not push BuzzFeed into the ravine, but she did nothing to slow her fall either. The texts and quizzes thus generated are not only mediocre and impersonal, the tool itself does not seem up to scratch. One of these generators for creating recipes, for example, does what it wants, completely ignoring the requests and conditions of user prompts.
Source : Futurism
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