Politico’s AI tool spits out made-up slop, union says

Axel Springer, Politico’s parent company, has been one of the more aggressive digital media companies in testing out new AI tools, despite some wariness from editorial staff. The Politico Pro report generator was created in response to demand from many of the publication’s most important subscribers, who pay premium rates for access to its information.

In a note to staff last month, Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner said that artificial intelligence will be crucial to the company’s success and will help it “work more efficiently and simply deliver better content.”

“In the future, there will be only two types of companies: those that use artificial intelligence extensively to break new and better ground, and those that fail to grasp this and will therefore disappear. There will only be disruptors and the disrupted,” he said. “The excellent will become even better, while the mediocre will vanish. Anyone who believes differently is fooling themselves.”

Both Politico and Business Insider, which is also owned by Axel Springer, have been aggressively embracing AI in recent months, sparking some internal debates about these still-nascent technologies and tools.

As Semafor reported last week, an attempt to better educate staff on business journalism was thwarted when an editor suggested a reading list for employees that contained nonexistent books, potentially the result of an AI hallucination.

In an all-staff meeting last week first reported by Semafor, Business Insider Editor in Chief Jamie Heller assured staff that despite a recent 21% reduction in staff, no jobs were being replaced by automated tools.