BuzzFeed debuts AI slop apps in bid for new revenue

BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media institution known champion for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism division, is reinventing itself for the AI era. At least, that’s the pitch.

At the SXSW league successful Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti introduced the company’s adjacent media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which volition research artificial quality successful consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection.

The caller institution is an hold of the experiments BuzzFeed has tally for years utilizing AI technology, Peretti explained, successful a halting presumption that began with slideshow glitches, earlier moving connected to app demos met with soundlessness oregon a polite tittering of laughter.

“We’ve been moving connected this secretly for implicit a year, and we’ve learned a batch from the BuzzFeed level astir what is coming with caller kinds of AI formats,” Peretti said. “Using AI is the mode of connecting people, gathering assemblage astir these pillars of culture, and taste, and community.”

Bill Shouldis, a manager of merchandise astatine BuzzFeed and the laminitis of Branch Office, presented 2 of the company’s caller apps: BF Island and Conjure.

The archetypal product, BF Island, is simply a radical chat level offering features for changing and editing photos utilizing AI. This is not precisely groundbreaking tech, successful and of itself, but that’s not the point.

Image Credits:SXSW (opens successful a caller window)

The cardinal diagnostic present is not the AI toolset but the in-app room of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could animate users to make AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends similar the McDonald’s CEO taste-testing a burger, oregon the “frame-mogging” drama. (If you don’t cognize what these are, you’re astir apt not the “very online” assemblage that’s being targeted.)

Image Credits:SXSW (opens successful a caller window)

Another app, Conjure, is an app akin to BeReal — the once-a-day impermanent photograph app — but that it alternatively appears to usher users to instrumentality regular photos of things too themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal itself didn’t stick, yet exiting to Voodoo aft losing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photograph punctual was “What lies betwixt the trees and the moon?”, starring the users to drawback a photograph of the nighttime sky. A bid of spooky images flashed connected the screen, followed by a whisper, “What volition you conjure?”

Image Credits:SXSW (opens successful a caller window)

We don’t get it, and intelligibly the assemblage didn’t either. After the demo, a lone cough could beryllium heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter.

Shouldis past noted that AI is progressive successful Conjure, too, arsenic the app has an “AI tone for a CEO.” (Again, what?)

Peretti besides introduced Quiz Party, a societal app that lets you instrumentality BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and stock your results.

BuzzFeed’s underwhelming presumption comes lone days aft the media institution shared that it has “substantial doubt” about its quality to proceed arsenic a business, and was engaging successful strategical conversations focused connected fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a nett nonaccomplishment of $57.3 cardinal past year, said it would absorption this twelvemonth connected its Studio IP and caller AI apps, similar these.

But adjacent the tech-forward assemblage astatine SXSW was not convinced.

As 1 idiosyncratic pointed retired during the Q&A league aft the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get radical to travel backmost aft the novelty wore off. What would an app similar Conjure bash to combat the aforesaid benignant of retention problem?

Shouldis said that the app would evolve, “and person antithetic types of things happening and not conscionable beryllium precisely what it is today.” He referenced the imaginable to integrate things similar video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to physique community.

The premise down the caller apps is not unreasonable: AI tin pb to faster bundle development, which makes it imaginable for companies to much rapidly iterate and support radical engaged.

“In a way, bundle is the caller content,” Peretti noted.

Of course, earlier you tin iterate, you person to pull users. With its caller apps, BuzzFeed seems to person thought much astir what AI tin bash than what radical privation to bash with AI, which is not a look for success.