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ChatGPT becomes a full-time columnist for the German publication Bild

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German tabloid Bild, Europe’s best-selling newspaper, will replace a number of newsroom positions with artificial intelligence as part of a €100 million cost-cutting programme that is expected to lead to hundreds of redundancies. The newspaper “unfortunately will part ways with peers who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by artificial intelligence and/or automated processes,” its owner, Europe’s biggest media publisher Axel Springer SE, said in an email addressed to staff. It stated that the roles of “editors, print production staff, sub-editors, proofreaders, and photo editors will no longer exist as they currently do,” according to the email, seen by rival newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ). The message follows an announcement made in February by CEO Mathias Döpfner that the publisher would be a “purely digital media company”. AI tools like ChatGPT could “make independent journalism better than it’s ever been—or replace it,” he said. He predicted that AI will soon be better at “aggregating information” than human journalists and said that only publishers who can create “the best original content—such as investigative journalism and original commentary—will survive.

Springer is not the first news publisher to look into artificial intelligence. BuzzFeed announced this year that it plans to use AI to “enhance” online content and quizzes, while the UK’s Daily Mirror and Daily Express are also exploring the use of AI. AI tools like ChatGPT can generate highly sophisticated texts from simple user requests, producing anything from essays and job applications to poems and works of fiction, but their responses are sometimes inaccurate or even invented. Men’s Journal and tech website Cnet have also used artificial intelligence to generate articles that are then reviewed by human editors to check their accuracy, though Cnet acknowledged in January that the project had limitations after reporting that more than half the articles had to be corrected. In April, the publishers of the German weekly Die Aktuelle fired their editor and apologised to Michael Schumacher’s family after publishing an “interview” with the legendary Formula 1 driver that was entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The 54-year-old seven-time Formula One world champion has not been seen in public since December 2013, when he suffered a serious head injury in a skiing accident in the French Alps. His family launched legal action against the magazine’s editors. Bild said it would try to avoid forced redundancies where possible, but that it was aiming to cut its editorial staff by “low three digits”, meaning around 200 jobs, the FAZ said, with the paper also set to cut the number of regional editions that it prints from 18 to 12. The email was signed by four top managers within the newspaper, including editors-in-chief Marion Horn and Robert Schneider, FAZ said. Similar measures could eventually be expected at Die Welt, the Springer group’s flagship daily, he suggested. Döpfner has already undertaken sweeping personnel changes at the tabloid, where sales have fallen from 4.5 million 20 or so years ago to just over 1 million copies last year, in an attempt to turn around a disappointing financial performance and to return after a series of scandals. The influential daily, whose sensationalist and heavily politicised reporting is often compared to that of Britain’s The Sun, was forced to fire its former editor, Julian Reichelt, amid allegations that he tried to cover up sexual misconduct and harassment. Earlier this year, Döpfner was forced to apologise after public leaks revealed that he tried to use Bild to influence the last German election and revealed his personal views, attacking climate change activism, COVID measures, and former chancellor Angela Merkel. The Association of German Journalists (DJV) criticised Springer’s plans, warning that job cuts at Bild would “sacrifice the group’s cash cow”. The move is “not only anti-social to employees but also extremely stupid from an economic point of view,” she said.

By Roberto Casseli        

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