Do journalism and ChatGPT mix? A leading men’s media company is about to find out – with a caveat
Men’s lifestyle media company Man of Many has launched a ChatGPT integration to enable readers to engage with content, in one of the first overt dabbles with artificial intelligence by a journalism operation.
But the brand’s co-founder Scott Purcell insisted this is not a slippery slope to machines producing stories, despite growing concern across the media industry about the threats posed by rapidly developing AI technology.
[Click to enlarge] Man of Many’s ChatGPT plugin
“If we ever do use it for anything like article outlines or coming up with headlines, we’ve got a policy that it has to be disclosed in mind with Google’s best practice policies.
“Our position hasn’t changed around actually producing any content using AI, so we’ve made sure we put some pretty strict guidelines around that internally with the team.”
Instead, Man of Many’s plugin lets readers interact with the site’s content library of 11,000 articles via conversational prompts, like “Where to buy a suit in Sydney?” or “What are the latest headlines?” and “What is a good gift idea for my dad?”
It also aims to increase site traffic with the plugin by providing previews of articles in response to user queries.
“[AI tools like] Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE) will likely fundamentally change the way users discover content online and as digital publishers,” Scott Purcell said. “we’re constantly navigating the complex landscape and impacts from AI.
“Our response through the Man of Many ChatGPT plugin, is one way to tackle the challenges of the new digital publishing era head on, with an innovative tool designed to provide more bespoke responses to queries and drive traffic back to our site. We’ll be actively working with all major parties and search engines to ensure our content is delivered in the most effective manner for users.”
Man of Many said the launch also comes following a recent collaboration between Microsoft and ChatGPT developer OpenAI, where the former announced the adoption of the same open plugin standard introduced by OpenAI for ChatGPT.
The plugin would help open up the site’s content to more users through guaranteed interoperability across ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Microsoft’s Copilot programs.
The Man of Many plugin is now available for free in the ChatGPT Plus plugin store.
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