Death by a Thousand Personality Quizzes
One might assume that when your boss finally comes to tell you that the robots are here to do your job, he won’t also point out with enthusiasm that they’re going to do it 10 times better than you did. Alas, this was not the case at BuzzFeed.
Yesterday, at a virtual all-hands meeting, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti had some news to discuss about the automated future of media. The brand, known for massively viral stories aggregated from social media and being the most notable progenitor of what some might call clickbait, would begin publishing content generated by artificial-intelligence programs. In other words: Robots would help make BuzzFeed posts.
“When you see this work in action it is pretty amazing,” Peretti had promised employees in a memo earlier in the day. During the meeting, which I viewed a recording of, he cut its workforce by about weeks before Christmas.) Instead, Peretti said, AI could be used to create “endless possibilities” for personality quizzes, a popular format that he called “a driving force on the internet.” You’ve surely come across one or two before: “,” for instance, or “”
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