The Washington Post now has an AI tool that will accurately answer all your questions

When generative AI is mentioned in relation to news, one usually jumps to the negative stories like fake news, lawsuits, copyright issues or threat of reporters getting replaced. However, some publications have embraced the technology to optimise content consumption for its users.

Recently, The Washington Post launched an experimental generative AI tool called “Ask the Post AI” that allows users to get conversational answers on any topic referenced by the newspaper since 2016. Here’s how this new tool works.

Using AI to provide fact-based answers

At the time when forwarded messages are being considered news, it is imperative that readers or users receive verified information as news on their smartphones. To enable this, The Washington Post has launched an AI-generative tool.

This new AI tool dives deep into the publications’ sourced, fact-based journalism to deliver curated results with summaries to aid users with relevant responses. The new chatbot aims to provide accurate answers to the questions posed by the users by relying on the newspaper’s content that has been covered since 2016.

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By using algorithm ranking, the Ask the Post AI provides answers that are relevant to the question raised by the user. In case, there aren’t any articles that are worth citing, the AI won’t answer the question at all. This way, it avoids any compulsion to provide wrong answers or hallucinate. To achieve this, the new AI chatbot is subjected to strict guardrails on how it responds.

This AI tool can reduce the amount of time required to research any topic. Since it leverages responses based on the archives, it ensures that the information received is verified. Also, the results are based on relevancy which is said to uphold the integrity of reporting.

It is important to note that this is not the first chatbot that the publication has released. Earlier this year, Climate Answers was deployed which focused on climate journalism. The publication also experimented with AI-audio read news and the Haystacker tool that would identify points of interest by organising photos, videos, and text.