The Washington Post has an AI newsboy to answer all your questions
The Washington Post has unveiled a new AI chatbot called “Ask The Post AI”, which aims to accurately answer user questions by relying on the newspaper’s content. The new AI chatbot follows the Climate answers chatbot, which the publication released earlier this year. Unlike the climate journalism-focused Climate Answers, Ask the Post draws its answers from everything published since 2016.
The AI uses algorithmic ranking to match answers to questions and ensure they are relevant. Like Climate Answers, the new AI chatbot maintains strict guardrails on how it responds. If there are no articles worth citing, it won’t answer the question at all. That way it avoids any compulsion on the AI to hallucinate or give wrong answers. The AI will simply say that it cannot answer at all.
Interactive AI journalism
“This is the next chapter in building habits for our next generation of users,” WashingtonPost Chief Technology Officer Vineet Khosla explained in a blog after. “The changing search experience across the industry requires us to respond to the moment and meet audiences how, when and where they want to be served with an updated user experience.”
“Ask The Post AI” arrives as The Washington Post has seen increased reader interest in its coverage post-2016. Increased reader engagement combined with new AI tools could help attract and retain new readers as well. Together with Climate Answers, The Washington Post tested several other AI tools, including AI-generated audio recordings of news articles and AI-written article summaries.
There is a clear call for streamlined access to information that provides reliable answers without lengthy research in the archives. Similar tools are likely to emerge at the intersection of AI and news media elsewhere. For example, Meta and Reuters are working together to provide Meta AI with information from Reuters articles.
