The Washington Post touted its new AI-generated personalized podcasts this week as “the ultimate intersection” of “premium experiences, customer choice and AI platform and products.” But whether it accurately showcases the company’s journalism is another matter.
Washington Post staffers railed against the company’s new “Your Personal Podcast” feature on Thursday after the tool, which was intended to allow users to create their own news-focused podcast episodes with preferred hosts and episode lengths, began fabricating quotes and editorializing, according to reports in Status and Semafor.
One staffer asked in a Post Slack channel, “What are the guardrails to ensure accuracy in this podcast?” according to Status. Another commented that it was “truly astonishing that this was allowed to go forward at all.”
“Never would I have imagined that the Washington Post would deliberately warp its own journalism and then push these errors out to our audience at scale,” the second staffer wrote. “And just days after the White House put up a site dedicated to attacking journalists, most notably our own, including for stories with corrections or editors notes attached. If we were serious we would pull this tool immediately.”
A Post spokesperson declined to comment, but they pointed to its public touting of the product as an early, “experimental” effort.
Still, the paper’s head of standards, Karen Pensiero, waded into the Slack channels on Thursday to note the episode was “frustrating for all of us,” according to Semafor.
The Post has worked for years to incorporate AI into its products, whether to synthesize stories or aid reporters in research for their work. But the episode reflects the flaws of the technology when integrated into journalistic endeavors, some of the same mistakes that have affected Bloomberg’s AI-generated story summaries and the Los Angeles Times’ “Insights” feature on opinion stories that used AI to measure an article’s political bias.
Generative AI has also been a focus for Post owner Jeff Bezos, who created a new AI start-up, Project Prometheus, last month. He is a co-CEO.
