Europe’s best-selling newspaper replaces a bunch of staff with AI

The newspaper is also reorganizing its business in the region, as well as reducing the number of publications from 18 to 12. The move is expected to result in a redundancy of hundreds of workers.

Europe’s largest media publisher Axel Springer – owner of Bild – wrote in an internal email to employees that the newspaper regretted having to part with its digital staff. , replaced by AI or automated processes.

Accordingly, the positions of editor, publication editing staff in publications, sub-editors, readers and photo editors at Bild will no longer exist as they are today.

German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) said the letter was confirmed by four top managers of the newspaper, including editor-in-chief Marion Horn and Robert Schneider. Similar measures are also possible for the daily Die Welt, also owned by publisher Axel Springer.

The announcement comes after CEO Mathias Döpfner announced in February that the publisher would become a “pure digital media company”. He says AI tools like ChatGPT can make independent journalism better than ever, or replace it.

Mr. Döpfner predicts AI will soon be better at synthesizing information than human journalists, and that only publishers that create “the best original content” – such as investigative journalism and original commentary – will survive. .

Bild has not yet provided a specific number of jobs that will be replaced by AI. The newspaper said it will try to avoid layoffs as much as possible.

Axel Springer isn’t the first news publisher to consider artificial intelligence “hiring”. BuzzFeed wants to use AI to enhance online content and quizzes, while the Daily Mirror and Daily Express in the UK are also exploring the use of artificial intelligence.

AI tools like ChatGPT can generate extremely sophisticated text from simple user suggestions. It produces everything from essays and job applications to poetry and works of fiction, but its responses are sometimes inaccurate or even fabricated.

Men’s Journal and technology news website Cnet have also used AI to write articles, which are then reviewed by human editors for accuracy. Cnet has admitted that this project has limitations because half of the articles written by AI need to be re-edited.

In April, the publisher of the German weekly magazine Die Aktuelle fired an editor and apologized to driver Michael Schumacher’s family after the editor published an interview with the Formula 1 legend. AI created, not completely real.

The 54-year-old champion has not appeared in public since December 2013, after he suffered a non-serious brain injury in a skiing accident in the French Alps. His family sued the publishers of Die Aktuelle magazine for publishing false articles.