The Washington Post is planning a chatbot powered by its own archive
The Washington Post is working with Virginia Tech to create a chatbot powered by the Post’s archive. Via Technical.ly:
The Post will also employ multimodal large language model (LLM) technology, meaning the AI tool won’t just pull from text, but also be able to integrate information found in audio or video reporting products.
This is becoming something of a trend: Earlier this year, the FT announced its own chatbot made from its archive — it’s being trialled by a small number of premium users.
The piece does not indicate how much of the Post’s legendary trove will be ingested into its bot. However, it notes that a homemade bot enhanced by an LLM has an advantage over ChatGPT or Claude or similar since the Post’s bot can include the very latest of its articles. That's a pretty good selling point.
(The Post, like thousands of publications, has blocked OpenAI’s crawler from being able to scrape its content.)