A media organization's brilliant use of AI

Happy Actual Friday, Collaborators!

Last week, we talked about how CNET fumbled its AI approach (41 of 77 articles they published with AI had to be amended due to errors and/or plagiarism). Honestly, it scared us.

CNET’s problems had readers asking how we could use AI safely. This week, we’re looking at a media organization that offers an answer. Let’s get into it!

-Mariah

Buzzfeed’s Brilliant AI Strategy

Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of Buzzfeed, has a unique way of celebrating the holidays.

He spent the 2022 festive season testing different uses of AI.

Buzzfeed had used AI since 2021 (when they launched a slightly disturbing quiz that creates your soulmate with an AI image generator). However, as Peretti looked at ways to infuse AI into the site’s most popular content, he was surprised by how much fun the new tools were.

The seeds planted in that holiday test would blossom into a unique AI content strategy for Buzzfeed.

“I think that there are two paths for AI in digital media,” Peretti told CNN. “One path is the obvious path that a lot of people will do — [...] using the technology for cost savings and spamming out a bunch of SEO articles that are lower quality than what a journalist could do, but a tenth of the cost. That’s one vision, but to me, that’s a depressing vision and a shortsighted vision because in the long run it’s not going to work.

“The other path [...] is the new model for digital media that is more personalized, more creative, more dynamic — where really talented people who work at our company are able to use AI together and entertain and personalize more than you could ever do without AI.”

By mid-January, Buzzfeed announced their first test of AI content. They were beginning with an unexpected asset: quizzes.

Why quizzes?

Ten years ago, Summer Anne Burton noticed something odd.

Buzzfeed’s “Which ‘Grease’ Pink Lady Are You?” quiz - which wasn’t a hit when it was first published - had become the site’s most shared post of the year. Digging deeper, she saw that a number of quizzes had a “long tail”, high engagement, and lots of social shares.

If content goes viral on social media, it can get as much as 34 times the traffic it gets on Buzzfeed’s site.

Burton and her team leaned into creating quizzes. They discovered that quizzes perform best when they guess something about the person (“What City Should You Actually Live In?”), or tap into their fandoms (“Which ‘Friends’ Character Are You?”). 

By 2022, quizzes had generated 1.1 billion views for Buzzfeed in a single year. Quizzes drive a significant share of site traffic for Buzzfeed and offer cool opportunities to be creative–which made them the perfect place to start AI tests.

Buzzfeed’s AI Quizzes

Imagine taking a quiz where your results are unique.