The Washington Post building. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
It began early in the morning Thursday. Staffers at The Washington Post jumped into the newsroom’s standards Slack channel, sounding alarms over the paper’s new A.I.-generated podcast feature, which debuted this week and was already shaping up to be a fiasco. The Post’s head of product, Bailey Kattleman, had touted the tool as a way for subscribers to build a custom audio show, in which listeners could select topics, episode length, even preferred hosts. But the A.I.-powered feature, which The Post excitedly hyped to the press, quickly proved to be far less reliable than the journalists whose work it was drawing from to deliver the news.
One after another, reporters and editors at the Will Lewis-led and Jeff Bezos-owned outlet flagged various problems on Wednesday, ranging from flat-out factual errors to instances where the bot—created in partnership with the third-party company Eleven Labs—appeared to fabricate quotes and wade into its own unsanctioned editorializing. Soon, the Slack channel was overflowing with dozens of Posties weighing in, pressing leadership for answers, and questioning how the feature had been publicly released in the first place.
"What are the guardrails to ensure accuracy in this podcast?" one staffer asked, according to a slew of internal messages obtained by Status, which this story is largely based on…
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Bari Weiss. (Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press)
Status Scoop | Weiss’ New Talent Boss: Bari Weiss is on the hunt for contributors, Status has learned. The CBS News editor in chief is looking to tap a raft of new personalities to use across the network's programming as she looks to reshape CBS, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. According to two of those people, Weiss has tapped…
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