If AI can personalize ads, why not news?

The Wall Street Journal’s scoop that Meta plans to offer personalized AI-generated ads by the end of the year points to a brave new world for advertising — and for news.

Increasingly sophisticated AI tools mean that companies — in this case, advertisers or Meta — are close to being able to generate, in real time, sales pitches specifically tailored to individuals. Per the Journal: “A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain, whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street.”

It doesn’t have to stop there. People who have a history of buying red cars might see an ad featuring one; if they like classical music, maybe that’s what the soundtrack plays; and so on. We’re on the brink of being able to create entirely personalized messages, limited only by compute power and how much data exists about the end user and their preferences.

That promises to upend the advertising industry. But what will it mean for news? How soon can we create much more personalized versions of an article? Perhaps you’d get a shorter, audio version when your phone detects you’re driving or running; or one that omits background information it knows you read yesterday; or one that weaves in more context when the AI believes it’s a topic you’re unfamiliar with. Or a bot could rewrite the story using language at a level you’re comfortable with, or offer a tool that allows you to engage in an extended conversation to find out more.

There’s much to recommend about news delivered this way. We’re all familiar with having to scroll past paragraphs of background information that we already know, or hunting through dozens of stories to find the local angles that matter to you. The existing model of news, where journalists write one version of a story and try to get it to as wide an audience as possible, leaves many communities underserved.

But there are also real questions about whether a world where everyone is in their own personal news bubble will increase polarization further, even if all the information they receive is entirely accurate. It’ll doubtless be a tool, too, for anyone who wants to personalize propaganda — or create precisely tailored political messaging that will make today’s micro-targeting look like a crude sledgehammer.

To be sure, there are multiple hurdles to overcome before any of this is a reality. It’s still difficult to prevent AI from hallucinating, and questions around intellectual property and copyright remain unsettled. (It’s possible a fully AI-generated story may not be protected under copyright law, and how news organizations could monetize content they don’t actually own is a tricky question.)

But the technology is tantalizingly close to enabling that future; generative AI is already upending search-driven news, and personalized news would put that development on steroids. Some newsrooms, like Semafor’s, are experimenting with using AI tools to help in production work; others are cutting deals with AI companies; and some are taking them to court. (Or, in some cases, doing all three.)

But those moves don’t fundamentally change how news organizations operate, for now. How will we adjust to a world where much of what we currently create and prize — words, stories, narratives — is made by machines? Arguably, that will put a premium on newsrooms that know what questions to ask, what information to uncover, and what their audiences care about. It’s an important question that we have to grapple with, and soon. We probably don’t have a lot of time to adapt.