“This partnership reflects a shared commitment to making reliable, factual information easier to find and engage with, especially on complex or fast-moving topics, where timely, well-sourced reporting, like that of The Post, matters most,” WaPo explained in a press release. “ChatGPT will highlight The Post’s journalism across politics, global affairs, business, technology, and more, always with clear attribution and direct links to full articles so people can explore topics in greater depth and context.”
The question is: will ChatGPT users actually click the links offered to them? This gets at the heart of the existential issue facing the Internet today as artificial intelligence replaces the traditional search engine. Google’s shift to prioritize AI-generated answers to queries has posed a huge threat to the online publishing industry. AI scrapes data from online outlets to provide answers and arguably trains users out of visiting those outlets. With that in mind, more outlets are forming partnerships with OpenAI in a valiant attempt to keep relevant and stay in the conversation. But the long form work of journalists and researchers—work that’s required in order for the AI to scrape from—is still being deprioritized, which in turn destabilizes the entire industry.
AI has begun encroaching on newsrooms around the world in various other forms. The Post declares itself “[Large Language Model]-agnostic as it embraces and builds its own range of AI-powered solutions for both its business and its users.” Among the artificially intelligent tools in The Washington Post‘s repertoire are generative AI tools like “Ask The Post AI” and “Climate Answers,” “Haystacker,” which helps its journalists sift through large data sets, and AI-powered summaries and audio for accessibility.
