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Sara Fischer: Time unveils new AI chatbot
This piece is by WWSG exclusive thought leader, Sara Fischer.
Time unveiled a new AI chatbot Thursday alongside its annual Person of the Year announcement.
Why it matters: By debuting the bot with one of its most popular stories of the year, Time will be able to gather chatbot engagement data from millions of global readers at once.
State of play: The Time AI chatbot allows users to ask questions about the story, summarize it into digestible bits of different lengths, translate the text into different languages, or play audio versions of the copy.
- It can translate the article into German, Spanish, French, Russian, Ukrainian and Mandarin.
- In addition to the 2024 Person of the Year story about President-elect Donald Trump, the new chatbot has also been prepared to answer questions about the previous three years’ winners — Taylor Swift, Volodymyr Zelensky and Elon Musk.
How it works: The chatbot answers questions based on Time editorial content and general knowledge embedded in the large language model (LLM) the chatbot is built on.
- It’s a “huge step up for Time,” said Time editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs. The chatbot, he said, is “a powerful way of extending our journalism, finding new audiences, presenting the new formats, and really amping up the quality of exposure.”
- For now, the chatbot can only answer limited user queries, such as background on people previously named Person of the Year, as well as historical context and insights from Time’s archives and existing content. It can also help Time suggest other relevant content for readers.
- “The power of this chat interface is really kind of a new version of recirculation, where we can immediately address the questions that you have or send you to another Time article that’s relevant to your questions,” Jacobs said.
Zoom in: Time hired Scale AI, a company that builds enterprise AI tools, to help create the chatbot.
- The partnership will allow Scale AI to publicly showcase its capabilities, and perhaps attract a new cohort of digital publishing clients, Scale AI chief strategy officer Jason Droege told Axios.
Zoom out: In the future, Time hopes to bring the tool to more stories and functions across its entire website, making its journalism more accessible globally, Time chief operating officer Mark Howard told Axios.
- For now, the company is hoping to collect as much data about the usage and consumption of its content via the chatbot before considering any sort of commercialization opportunities, Howard said.
At launch, the chatbot includes no advertising, but in the future it could become part of a sponsorship package offering.
- Time removed its paywall in 2023 to make its content more accessible. That effort coincided with a shift in its business towards selling more large-scale sponsorships alongside its major franchises, including Person of the Year.
- “The North Star for this is total engagement time,” Howard said, when asked how Time will measure the chatbot’s success. “Did this help keep people engaged with the content longer than a standard article page?”
The big picture: Several newsrooms have begun experimenting with building AI chatbots, but they haven’t had as much visibility as Time’s Person of the Year feature is likely to drive.
- Time has taken an aggressive approach to AI experimentation. It struck a multiyear content licensing deal and strategic partnership with OpenAI in June. It was one of the first publishers to partner with AI search company Perplexity and to work with Fox Corp. on its AI blockchain platform, Verify.
What to watch: Time plans to start deploying the chatbot to more content across its website in early 2025, Howard said.
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