Germany’s Bild tabloid, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, plans to replace a range of editorial jobs with artificial intelligence (AI), it has told staff in an email, according to The Guardian.
As part of a separate, more immediate €100m cost-cutting program aimed at restoring profitability, the paper is also reorganizing its regional newspaper business in a move expected to lead to hundreds of redundancies.
The newspaper would “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes”, its owner, Europe’s largest media publisher, Axel Springer SE, said in an email to staff.
It said the roles of some “editors, print production staff, subeditors, proofreaders and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today”, according to the email, seen by the rival Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (FAZ).
Bild executive lauds AI
The message follows an announcement in February by the chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, that the publisher was to be a “purely digital media company”. AI tools such as ChatGPT could “make independent journalism better than it ever was – or replace it”, he said.
He predicted that AI would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than human journalists and said that only publishers who created “the best original content” – such as investigative journalism and original commentary – would survive.
Bild had no immediate estimate for the number of jobs that might eventually be lost to AI.
Springer is not the first news publisher to look at artificial intelligence. BuzzFeed this year announced it aimed to use AI to “enhance” content and online quizzes, while the Daily Mirror and Daily Express in the UK are also exploring the use of artificial intelligence, The Guardian reports.
AI tools such as ChatGPT can generate highly sophisticated text from simple user prompts, producing anything from essays and job applications to poems and works of fiction, but its responses are sometimes inaccurate or even fabricated.
Men’s Journal and the tech website Cnet have also been using AI to generate articles later scanned for accuracy by human editors – although Cnet conceded in January the project had limitations after reports that more than half of articles had to be corrected.
In April, the publishers of the German weekly magazine Die Aktuelle sacked its editor and apologized to the family of Michael Schumacher after it ran an “interview” with the Formula One legend that had been entirely generated by AI.
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