Questions of accuracy arise as Washington Post uses AI to create personalized podcasts [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Source: NPR

It's not your mother's podcast — or your father's, or anyone else's. The Washington Post's new offering, "Your Personal Podcast," uses artificial intelligence to customize podcasts for its users, blending the algorithm you might find in a news feed with the convenience of portable audio.

The podcast is "personalized automatically based on your reading history" of Post articles, the newspaper says on its help page. Listeners also have some control: At the click of a button, they can alter their podcast's topic mix — or even swap its computer-generated "hosts."

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In the newspaper's app, a note advises listeners to "verify information" by checking the podcast against its source material.

In a statement, the Washington Post Guild — which represents newsroom employees and other staff — tells NPR, "We are concerned about this new product and its rollout," alleging that it undermines the Post's mission and its journalists' work.

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Read more: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/13/nx-s1-5641047/washington-posts-ai-podcast

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So here's their AI podcast, but it gets its news wrong, so you're on your own with fact-checking. This is the standard corporate disclaimer for generative AI tools that can make mistakes on almost anything. Mistakes the corporations don't want to be held legally liable for.

This is a customized podcast because the goal is to get customers addicted to using it. That's more important than truth and journalistic integrity to the Post.

And any children or gullible adults who can be conned into making this AI corporate-controlled puppet show a source of news can be very easily fed disinformation and manipulated by those controlling the AI, as the foolish customers choose fake journalists they find particularly likable or trustworthy - fake journalists who still get their script from a corporation. It's sort of a do-it-yourself create-your-own-brainwasher kit. And it takes time away from getting more news more quickly, from more reliable sources, by reading.