If you read BuzzFeed between 2014 and 2019, chances
are high that you took a quiz. You selected a picture of your favorite puppy,
your ideal house, and your favorite city, and BuzzFeed told you what Disney
princess you were. The quizzes became something of a calling card for the
company, which expanded to offer a wide range of content, including
news-breaking features, a daily talk show streamed live on Twitter, and even a
line of branded kitchenware, during that time period.
اضافة اعلان
“Like or Pass on These Pop-Tart Flavors and We’ll Guess Your
Relationship Status”: Yes, that is a real quiz from 2018 you can still take
today.
On Thursday, BuzzFeed announced that it was planning to use
automated technology from OpenAI, the creator of the buzzy ChatGPT chatbot, to
create content for the site. “In 2023, you’ll see AI-inspired content move from
an R&D stage to part of our core business enhancing the quiz experience,
informing our brainstorming, and personalizing our content for our audience,”
Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the company and its CEO, wrote in a memo sent to
staff members and published on the site. “In tough economic times, we need to
fight for every penny of revenue, and try to save every penny of costs,” he
added.
In a private demonstration, BuzzFeed’s artificial
intelligence-powered quiz module wrote a paragraph for us about our own
personalized secret society. We entered details like our names, a friend’s name,
and our most recent meal. (We picked pepperoni pizza.) The AI spit back a
detailed description of the society, including an initiation ritual that
involved eating copious amounts of pepperoni pizza. It was like a custom Mad
Libs, if your book of Mad Libs were a bit more sentient. In this case, the AI —
using a prompt created by a person — wrote a little story about a secret
society with the words and proper names we had supplied.
“I think a lot of the really fun stuff is done by humans,”
Peretti said when asked which parts of quiz creation were being handled by people
and which were being automated. “Thinking of the concept of a secret society
quiz, that’s something that our team came up with — thinking of what are the
best questions to ask to get really interesting responses from the audience.”
He also stressed that BuzzFeed’s readers were an important part of the process.
“What you put into the quiz really has a big impact on what you get out,” he
said.
BuzzFeed’s stock more than doubled in value Thursday after
Peretti announced the AI news.
AI quizzes are expected to begin appearing early next month.
‘Not surprised’Former BuzzFeed employees were not surprised, although some
had reservations about the new approach.
As one former employee, Matthew Perpetua, said: “It just
feels like a lot of what makes quizzes, or any content — whether it’s BuzzFeed
or anything — what makes it really work the majority of the time is some kind
of human touch, like some kind of soul to it. You know, an identifiable sense
of humor.”
Perpetua, 43, began working at BuzzFeed in 2012. He was most
recently the site’s director of quizzes and games before being laid off in
2019. He now works in digital marketing at Fidelity Investments.
“I started to age out of being culturally relevant, and they replaced me with a 23-year-old who they could pay half my salary, and it never hurt my feelings. … This just feels kind of like an evolution of that same thing. … Like the millennials got replaced by Gen Z, and now Gen Z is getting replaced by AI.”
“While I know on a spreadsheet level that quality is not
necessarily what moves the bar, it is pretty clear that over time, these things
become less relevant if they’re not really, like, exciting for people in a
meaningful way,” Perpetua said. “And I think it’s much harder for the AI
content to do that.”
During his time in charge of quizzes, the company began
encouraging BuzzFeed readers — referred to as community members — to make
quizzes for the site for free.
At first, that worked well. Community members were regularly
generating new quizzes that were popular with readers at a significant scale.
An ‘undoing’“But that ended up being kind of like the undoing,” Perpetua
said, adding that about a year before he was laid off, he and others had
realized, “Oh, my God, the sheer volume of user-generated quizzes is bringing
in enough traffic that it’s kind of like this big iceberg propping up the whole
site.”
He added, “I remember seeing these data visualizations,
going like, ‘Wow,’ but also having the thing in my brain go, ‘Oh, this means
that they’re probably not going to want to pay people to do this anymore if
they do this for free,’ which is basically what happened.”
One of those community creators was Rachel McMahon of Grand
Rapids, Michigan, who was a teenager at the time. According to a blog post
Perpetua published after he had been laid off, McMahon was among BuzzFeed’s
highest traffic drivers worldwide, making “dozens of quizzes every week.”
In an interview with New York Magazine in 2019, McMahon
estimated she had made just shy of 700 quizzes. “Like or Pass on These Pop-Tart
Flavors and We’ll Guess Your Relationship Status” was her most popular work.
“It’s like those, like, shower thoughts that humans have
that are so weird and so out there,” McMahon, who went on to publish quiz books
with Random House and Simon & Schuster, said of what makes a particular
quiz resonate with readers. “I just don’t think ChatGPT can have shower
thoughts.”
At the end of 2018, BuzzFeed sent McMahon a package
containing branded swag. “They told me I was the No. 1 user this year with all
my views,” she told New York Magazine. McMahon, now 23 and working for Netflix,
felt guilty at the time that her work as a community member could have affected
the jobs of BuzzFeed employees. She stopped making quizzes in 2019.
“I never had any delusions that the expertise that we were
bringing to quiz making or list writing in the mid-2010s wasn’t expendable — I
got laid off when I was 29, and that did not feel like a coincidence to me,”
said Erin Chack, a former BuzzFeed senior editor who, like Perpetua, was laid
off in 2019. “I started to age out of being culturally relevant, and they
replaced me with a 23-year-old who they could pay half my salary, and it never
hurt my feelings.”
“This just feels kind of like an evolution of that same
thing,” she added. “Like the millennials got replaced by Gen Z, and now Gen Z
is getting replaced by AI.”
“I see people online being like, ‘You could never paint the
Sistine Chapel with AI,’” said Chack, who now works for Netflix. “I don’t think
it’s that precious. I would not be surprised if these robots write wonderful,
nuanced quizzes.” Chack, 33, started at the company in 2014.
Still, some former employees feel something intangible, yet
critical, is lost when you remove the human element from content creation. “I
think now that the quizzes are so template-ized a robot probably could write a
BuzzFeed quiz, but it’s going to be lacking the heart that we all really put
into it back in the day,” said Jen Lewis, a former senior
illustrator who left the company in 2017. Lewis’ early design work would go on
to become the colorful and widely recognizable style associated with BuzzFeed
quizzes.
Chack cited a quiz, created by a colleague at the time,
Mackenzie Kruvant, in which users answered questions to find out which member
of the Beatles they were. The twist was that the only possible outcome after
answering the quiz was Ringo Starr. Every person who took the quiz, no matter
what they answered, was told they were Ringo Starr.
“I’m sure they will write successful quizzes,” Chack said of
OpenAI. “I’m sure they will write quizzes that get clicked on. Will they write
‘Which Beatle Are You,’ and every answer is Ringo?”
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