Buzz feed – the media site that made a name for itself (literally) spreading viral content – ended up in the in the middle of the hustle and bustle even last month when news leaked that this would happen partner with the AI startup of the moment, OpenAI, to build a new AI-powered quiz format, building on the media company’s highly popular quizzes that saw 1.1 billion views last year alone.
Now that new product is launching: Infinity Quizzes, as it’s called, gives users a basic theme, asks a few keyword questions, and builds a light-hearted, personal story from that. BuzzFeed said the quizzes are powered by an AI it calls “Buzzy the Robot,” based on OpenAI’s publicly available API trained on a mix of text, code and information before June 2021.
The collaboration goes live today with six quizzes, including four on Valentine’s Day, one sponsored by an advertiser, and one for premium subscribers only: “Create Your Own Rom-Com,” “Generate a Break-Up Text,” “Date Your Celebrity Crush ‘, ‘Find your soulmate (Hint: it’s a houseplant)’, ‘Create Your Own Cinematic Universe for You and Your Friends’ and ‘Create a Cult for You and Your Friends’. (I’m not sure how lighthearted anyone would find the last of these…)
If you’ve ever played Mad Libs or anything like it, Infinity Quizzes are a lot like those, except the idea is that the stories that emerge from user responses to a theme are theoretically “infinite” in their variations, hence the name. But similar to other generative AI services – albeit OpenAIs ChatGPT, Shutterstock’s image generators or something else – the results are a bit hit and miss. Personalization is there, but sometimes with awkward wording or cookie-cutter results (see a few attempts I made at the bottom of this article).
BuzzFeed deals with AI since the launch of an image generator in 2021yet, when the OpenAI work was first revealed, it caused a huge stir.
There are many people who are skeptical that AI is an extremely positive development, some even downright alarmed by thought – a big/obvious threat is that it can make people and the role they play obsolete.
So BuzzFeed’s jump into the arms of a startup currently spearheading generative AI — which uses tiny cues from humans to build elaborate stories, music, images, or other original content — to create content previously created exclusively by humans. would have been made felt like a signal to many: whatever dystopian future you think is just around the corner, it’s already here.
(It didn’t help that BuzzFeed announced this would happen several weeks before the OpenAI leak lays off 12% of the workforce.)
Of course, not all reactions were negative. BuzzFeed is listed on Nasdaq and the was in the doldrums before the OpenAI leak, with stocks trading for less than a dollar apiece. The news caused the share price to skyrocket, and while it’s calmed down now, it’s worth seeing if the impact of this deal was a flash or something that can be supported by and for the company, or at least or the more investors can generate enthusiasm – and yes, buzz.
In that regard, we asked BuzzFeed questions about this news, including whether it can share any financial details of its partnership with OpenAI, and whether the latter will get a discount on sponsorship deals. None of those details are being disclosed at this time.
While the startup has really caught the world’s attention and put in a huge investment from Microsoft at a huge valuation, there are still big question marks about what will stick around when it comes to building revenue and profits around its breakthroughs.
And given that there have been some significant issues around the sources of the data that feed generative AI algorithms, the court case between Getty and Stability AI highlighting just one of the issues – we also asked what happens to the data entered into the Infinity Quizzes, including whether it is used anywhere other than the stories.
“BuzzFeed currently stores anonymized prompts and results from OpenAI to improve performance. OpenAI has data privacy and security policies to protect user data,‘ said a spokesman. It will also use the data to inform which quizzes to build next.
As for taking people out of the equation completely, it sounds like BuzzFeed isn’t doing this – at least not at the moment. The company says the quizzes and resulting stories are a collaborative effort between BuzzFeed’s quiz writers, “AI technology, henceforth referred to as ‘Buzzy The Robot’ (official title: BuzzFeed’s AI Creative Assistant)” and the quiz takers themselves.
At the moment it looks like it are also heavy lifting – lots of testing and tweak to be sure outcomes are fun and current. That should come Doingw over time.
“At BuzzFeed, the creative team’s approach to integrating AI is to build content that is “AI native” or couldn’t exist without artificial intelligence (such as an infinite number of instant, personalized quiz results); and things made by humans, but *enhanced* by AI,” the company notes.
