{"id":2272,"date":"2025-06-04T16:05:31","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T16:05:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/washington-post-ai-articles\/"},"modified":"2025-06-04T16:05:31","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T16:05:31","slug":"washington-post-ai-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/washington-post-ai-articles\/","title":{"rendered":"The Washington Post Is Secretly Planning to Start Publishing Articles Created Using AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"720\" height=\"378\" src=\"https:\/\/wordpress-assets.futurism.com\/2025\/06\/washington-post-ai-articles-1.jpg\" class=\"attachment-full size-full wp-post-image\" alt=\"The Washington Post has quietly been building an AI tool that takes much of the work out of writing as it attempts to recoup readership.\" style=\"margin-bottom: 15px;\" decoding=\"async\"><\/div>\n<p>As the news media continues its <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/business-insider-ai-reading-list\">often-disastrous pivot<\/a> towards generative artificial intelligence, the\u00a0most prominent publication yet has jumped on board: the <em>Washington Post<\/em>,\u00a0it turns out, has quietly been building an AI tool designed to let underqualified writers publish content in its storied pages.<\/p>\n<p>According to multiple sources familiar with the plan who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/06\/03\/business\/media\/washington-post-opinion-ripple.html\">spoke to the\u00a0<em>New York Times<\/em><\/a>, since April the newspaper has been secretly building a program known as &#8220;Ripple&#8221; that appears to be part syndication, part talent network akin to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/01\/18\/business\/media\/huffpost-unpaid-contributors.html\">contributor schemes at <em>HuffPost<\/em><\/a> and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.buzzfeednews.com\/article\/jonchristian\/jayson-demers-audienceboom-forbes-entrepreneur-pay-for-play\"><em>Forbes<\/em><\/a><em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The biggest difference from those prior contributor networks and this one,\u00a0though, is the way the sausage will be made.<\/p>\n<p>Along with partnerships with established writers, the new program will employ an &#8220;AI writing coach&#8221; called &#8220;Ember&#8221; designed to guide &#8220;nonprofessionals&#8221; through the article-writing process.<\/p>\n<p>That tool will, per early prototypes described to the <em>NYT<\/em>, hand-hold aspiring columnists through every aspect of the writing process from start to finish. Its sidebar will instruct writers to devise an &#8220;early thesis,&#8221; list out &#8220;supporting points,&#8221; and provide a &#8220;memorable ending&#8221; \u2014 all while a live AI chatbot weighs in and a &#8220;story strength&#8221; tracker evaluates their progress.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of it all, a human editor is said to review the columns before they go to publication \u2014\u00a0though in practice, similar promises have often ended in disaster, like at\u00a0<em>CNET<\/em>, which promised that editors were reviewing the <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/cnet-publishing-articles-by-ai\">scores of AI-generated articles<\/a> it ran before it turned out they were <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/cnet-ai-errors\">riddled with errors<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/cnet-ai-plagiarism\">plagiarism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Though the outputs from <i>WaPo<\/i>&#8216;s program wouldn&#8217;t be <em>entirely <\/em>generated by AI, it sounds like everything but. And in practice, as we&#8217;ve seen time and again, the temptation with AI is to use it not as a thoughtful creative partner but as a speedrunning tool to churn out large quantities of low-quality material, or to cook up something that sounds confident but is shaky on the undergirding facts and logic.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, it sounds like the program could be poised to take everything that&#8217;s currently broken and controversial about newspaper opinion sections and amplify it using generative AI.<\/p>\n<p><em>WaPo<\/em> declined to provide comment for the <em>NYT<\/em>&#8216;s expos\u00e9.\u00a0It&#8217;s worth noting that the <em>NYT\u00a0<\/em>has been putting significant resources of its own into exploring how AI can be responsibly used in journalism \u2014 but while it&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/10\/07\/reader-center\/how-new-york-times-uses-ai-journalism.html\">using certain machine learning tools<\/a> for tasks like finding patterns in large datasets, it&#8217;s pledged not to use generative AI to write any articles.<\/p>\n<p>The revelation also comes during a period of broader crisis at\u00a0<em>WaPo<\/em>, with significant layoffs coming as\u00a0its owner Jeff Bezos has increasingly exerted control over the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2025\/feb\/26\/jeff-bezos-washington-post-opinion\">content and ideological leaning<\/a> of the paper&#8217;s journalism.<\/p>\n<p>Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/entertainment-arts-65609965\">eat your heart out<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>More on AI writing<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/business-insider-ai-reading-list\"><em>Business Insider Did Something So Stupid With AI That We\u2019re Reeling<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/washington-post-ai-articles\">The Washington Post Is Secretly Planning to Start Publishing Articles Created Using AI<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the news media continues its often-disastrous pivot towards generative artificial intelligence, the\u00a0most prominent publication yet has jumped on board: the Washington Post,\u00a0it turns out, has quietly been building an&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[414,195,177,1367,1368],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-journalism","category-ai-writing","category-artificial-intelligence","category-jeff-bezos","category-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}