The biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, the German tabloid Bild, has informed staff via email that it aims to use artificial intelligence to replace a number of editorial positions as part of a €100 million cost-cutting programme.
The newspaper is also restructuring its regional newspaper operations, a move that is anticipated to result in hundreds of layoffs. The newspaper’s owner, Europe’s largest media publisher, Axel Springer SE, informed staff via email that it will “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes.”
According to the email, which was obtained by the rival Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (FAZ), editors, print production staff, subeditors, proofreaders, and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today.
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The statement comes after the publisher’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, said that it would be a “purely digital media company” in February. According to him, ChatGPT and other AI tools might replace independent journalism or make it better than it has ever been.
He asserted that AI would eventually surpass human journalists in the aggregation of information and that only publishers who produced the best original content, such as investigative journalism and original commentary, would endure. The number of jobs that could potentially be lost to AI wasn’t disclosed by Bild.
