The Washington Post’s rollout of AI-generated podcasts hit a humiliating roadblock after staff called internally for the project to be pulled over major errors, according to Semafor.
The publication, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced this week it was launching a “personalized, AI podcast experience” within its app.
But within 48 hours of launch, the project sparked internal backlash in the newsroom after the AI-generated podcasts were found to contain errors, Semafor reported.
According to four people familiar with the situation cited by Semafor, errors ranged from pronunciation mistakes to misattribution or invented quotes, and added commentary that appeared to present a source’s remarks as the newspaper’s own position.
The new AI podcasts were supposed to allow users to “shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts, and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology.”
The blunders were slammed by the newspaper’s head of standards, Karen Pensiero, who said in an internal message to staff, shared with Semafor, that they have been “frustrating for all of us.”
One editor said that if the Post was “serious,” it would “pull this tool immediately,” and questioned why it was allowed to launch in the first place.
“It is truly astonishing that this was allowed to go forward at all,” the editor wrote on Slack. “Never would I have imagined that the Washington Post would deliberately warp its own journalism and then push these errors out to our audience at scale. And just days after the White House put up a site dedicated to attacking journalists, most notably our own, including for stories with corrections or editors notes attached.”
In the Post’s initial rollout email, it said the product “is in beta, which means we will continue to improve it based on user feedback.”
The rollout also drew skepticism online. On Bluesky, users savaged the idea, questioned whether audiences wanted it, and expressed concerns about whether the AI-generated podcasts could keep in line with the Post’s editorial standards.
“This will not be successful. Every arrow points to this fact. It is a terrible idea just on its merits alone,” one user wrote.
Another wrote, “I hope you’re right if only for corporations to realize that NO ONE WANTS THIS.”
“Call me crazy but shouldn’t knowledgeable professionals curate the most important information an informed citizenry would need?” one person asked.
“There’s no way WP is going to be able to enforce any meaningful quality standards on an absolute firehose of information, and if instead they’re limiting the output to a bunch of slightly different canned responses, then it’s going to sound like c--p,” another added.
The fiasco comes days after Bezos’ Amazon quietly pulled glitchy AI dubs on several popular anime series on Amazon Prime Video following widespread backlash.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Washington Post for comment.
