The Washington Post’s AI Podcast Rollout Has Been A Train Wreck

Earlier this week, The Washington Post launched a customizable artificial intelligence podcast format targeting younger adults, but the episodes are causing headaches for news and standards editors at the paper, Semafor reported on Thursday.

The Post’s new AI format, called “Your Personal Podcast,” allows users to customize their listening experience by choosing the topic, host, and length of a show, per a report from marketing and media website Digiday. But according to Semafor, which viewed internal communications from the Post, the AI podcasts are spitting out fake quotes and adding commentary to stories that are supposed to be simple news reports.

Washington Post staff began flagging issues immediately after the AI podcasts were released to the public. The AI behind “Your Personal Podcast” has made significant changes to story content, including inventing quotes and presenting them as the Post’s editorial position on a particular issue.

The disastrous AI podcast rollout has reportedly infuriated editors who are already trying to push back on the Trump administration after it recently labeled the Post one of the worst “media offenders.”

“It is truly astonishing that this was allowed to go forward at all,” one Post editor said, according to Semafor. “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. If we were serious we would pull this tool immediately.”

Karen Pensiero, the Post’s head of standards, added that the AI debacle has been “frustrating for all of us.”

The Daily Wire reached out to the Post, seeking comment.

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The Washington, D.C., newspaper has been looking for ways to incorporate AI-generated content into its audio platforms and signed a multi-year deal with AI voice-generating software company ElevenLabs in May 2024. Media outlets, including the Post, Time, and The Atlantic, have used ElevenLabs to create audio versions of articles on their websites, but the Post’s “Your Personal Podcast” project took AI generation to a new level in media production.

Bailey Kattleman, the Post’s head of product and design, said that “Your Personal Podcast” would give news consumers a “flexible way” to access the paper’s wide array of stories, according to Digiday. Kattleman said that she is excited to learn what the customizable AI-generated content says about listeners’ habits and interests.

“It’s early, and it’s an experimental product in a lot of ways,” she said. “It’s kind of inventing a new category in a way. It’s so different from traditional podcasts. We’ll definitely be looking at habit-based metrics rather than volume in the early going.”

Semafor’s report on the Post’s plunge into AI-generated content, however, suggests that the move could come back to bite the newspaper that is attempting to redefine its image. The Post, which was purchased by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013, is supposedly in the process of making major changes to its opinion section per orders from Bezos.

Bezos told the Post’s staff in an email in February, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

The Post’s news team has continued to face criticism after publishing a story late last month claiming that War Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an order for a second strike on a suspected drug boat after he saw survivors in the water and gave the command to “kill them all.” The Post’s reporting, which relied on “two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” was refuted by Navy Admiral Mitch Bradley, who told Congress that Hegseth did not give a “kill them all” order.