The Washington Post has an AI newsboy to answer all your questions

(Image credit: Future)

The Washington Post has unveiled a new AI chatbot called "Ask The Post AI," which aims to answer user questions accurately by relying on the newspaper's content. The new AI chatbot follows the Climate Answers chatbot, which the publication released earlier this year. Unlike the climate journalism-focused Climate Answers, Ask the Post culls its answers from anything published since 2016.

The AI uses algorithmic ranking to match answers to questions and ensure they are relevant. Like Climate Answers, the new AI chatbot enforces strict guardrails on how it responds. If there aren't any articles it defines as worth citing, it won't answer the question at all. That way, it avoids any compulsion by the AI to hallucinate or provide wrong answers. The AI will just say it can't answer at all.

Interactive AI Journalism

“This is the next chapter in building habits for our next generation of users,” Washington Post chief technology officer Vineet Khosla explained in a blog post. “The changed search experience across the industry calls for us to meet the moment and meet audiences how, when and where they want to be served with an updated user experience.”

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"Ask The Post AI" arrives as The Washington Post has seen an uptick in interest from readers on its post-2016 coverage. The heightened reader engagement combined with new AI tools might serve to draw in and keep new readers as well. Along with Climate Answers, The Washington Post has been testing several other AI tools, including AI-generated audio recordings of news articles and AI-written summaries of articles.

There's an obvious appeal for streamlined information access that supplies reliable answers without long research in the archives. Similar tools will likely crop up at the intersection of AI and news media elsewhere. For instance, Meta and Reuters have partnered to supply Meta AI with information from Reuters articles.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.