The Washington Post plans to continue publishing its AI-generated personalized podcasts despite internal criticism that the initiative is flouting newsroom standards.
“This is how products get built and developed in the digital age: ideation, research, design and prototyping, development, and then Beta,” a Post spokesperson told TheWrap. “Only if they prove to be successful for the customer do they then get launched. As stated clear on Your Personal Podcast, it is currently in Beta.”
The stance came after reports on Sunday shed more light on the product, which the Post launched last week as “the ultimate intersection” of “premium experiences, customer choice and AI platform and products.”
Roughly two-thirds of the product’s initial scripts failed a Post metric that determined whether the product met its newsroom standards, according to Semafor. The paper’s testers were told to grade the scripts on a pass/fail basis and, if in doubt, to fail the script as a precaution. On that curve, between 68% and 84% of scripts failed after three rounds of tests.
The newsroom’s standards Slack channel also saw Post staffers continuing to rail against the product. “I hope that the product team understands that this is not just a pearl-clutching overreaction by a bunch of backwards thinking Luddites,” one staffer wrote, according to Status. “These errors are a threat to the core of what we do.”
Still, the product team believed it could “iterate” through any of the issues, according to Semafor, so long as the newsroom labeled the tool as a work in progress that could generate issues. Some of the most glaring faults included fabricating quotes and offering commentary that conflated quotes with the paper’s position on any given issue.
Some of that frustration, which kicked off last week, has been acknowledged internally. The paper’s head of standards, Karen Pensiero, waded into a Slack channel last week to note the episode was “frustrating for all of us.”
