The Washington Post ( ) has unveiled a “Ask The Post AI,” new AI chatbot that aims to accurately answer user questions by relying upon the newspaper’s contents. The publication released a Climate Answers chatbot earlier this year. Ask the Post, unlike Climate Answers which focuses on climate journalism, pulls answers from any published material since 2016.
AI uses algorithmic ranking in order to match answers with questions and ensure that they are relevant. The new AI chatbot enforces strict guardrails in how it responds. It will not answer a question if it doesn’t find any articles that it deems worthy of citation. This way, the AI is not forced to give incorrect answers or hallucinate. The AI will simply say that it cannot answer.
Interactive AI Journalism
Washington Post Chief Technology Officer Vineet Khoosla explained in a recent blog post that “This is the new chapter in building habits for our users of tomorrow.” “The changed experience of search across the industry requires us to meet the moment, and meet audiences where, when and how they want to be served. With an updated user experience.” The combination of increased reader engagement and new AI tools could also serve to attract and retain new readers. The Washington Post and Climate Answers have been testing other AI tools. These include AI-generated audio recordings for news articles, as well as AI-written summaries.
There is an obvious appeal to streamlined information access, which provides reliable answers without lengthy research in the archive. Other news media and AI intersections will likely produce similar tools. Meta and Reuters, for example, have partnered up to provide Meta AI with data from Reuters articles.
Meta AI is now a Reuters Newsboy
Eric Hal Schwartz has been a freelance writer at TechRadar for more than 15 years. He has covered the intersection of technology and the world. He was the head writer of Voicebot.ai for five years and was at the forefront of reporting on large language models and generative AI. Since then, he has become an expert in the products of generative AI, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. He also knows Google Gemini and all other synthetic media tools. His experience spans print, digital and broadcast media as well as live events. He’s now continuing to tell stories that people want to hear and need to know about the rapidly changing AI space and the impact it has on their lives. Eric is based out of New York City.