Germany's Newspaper “Bild” will replace Staff with AI

Europe's best-selling newspaper, German tabloid "Bild" plans to replace a number of editorial positions with artificial intelligence as part of a €100m cost-cutting program, Britain's "Guardian" reported, citing emails sent to the paper's staff. The group will also reorganize its business with regional newspapers, which will lead to hundreds of redundancies in total.

The tabloid "will unfortunately part ways with colleagues whose tasks in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes," the owner of Europe's largest media publisher Axel Springer said in the letters to staff. The correspondence, seen by rival Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ), said the posts of "editors, print production staff, proofreaders and photo editors editors will no longer exist as before".

The news follows a previous announcement in February by CEO Mathias Döpfner that the publishing company would be a "purely digital media company". AI tools like ChatGPT can "make independent journalism better than ever before - or replace it," he said.

Döpfner predicted that artificial intelligence will soon be better at "summarizing information" than "human journalists" and said that only journalists who create "the best original content" - such as investigative journalism and original commentary - will survive.

Bild did not have an immediate estimate of the number of jobs that could ultimately be lost to AI.

Springer isn't the first news publisher to turn its attention to artificial intelligence. BuzzFeed announced this year that it aims to use AI to "enhance" content and online quizzes, while the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express are also exploring the use of artificial intelligence.