How one publisher is using generative AI to publish thousands of evergreen posts, create a chatbot

Ingenio has used generative AI technology to publish over 11,000 articles. The company, which owns websites like Horoscope.com and Astrology.com, will soon launch a chatbot that will provide readers with personalized spiritual guidance.

That’s according to Josh Jaffe, Ingenio’s president of media, who spoke on the strategy Tuesday at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado. It’s one way publishers (many of them skeptical) are turning to AI to experiment with content creation.

Ingenio started using generative AI technology to create content at the end of 2021, integrating OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology into its content management system. Since then, Ingenio created a new website around dream interpretations with over 700 articles generated by AI technology. It also published 10,000 articles featuring celebrity birth charts and horoscopes to revamp its existing site SunSigns.com. On its flagship sites Horoscope.com and Astrology.com, about 1,000 articles were published using generative AI to “plug SEO holes,” Jaffe said.

“We wouldn’t have been able to launch into an adjacent topic like dream interpretations without this tool. We wouldn’t have been able to write up 10,000 celebrity profiles without generative AI,” Jaffe said.

Around 90% of each of those articles is generated by AI technology, Jaffe said. Those articles do not feature a byline, but are labeled with that website’s name, for example: “by Horoscope.com.” There is some editorial oversight on these pieces — such as checking headlines and accuracy — but the process puts most of the responsibility on OpenAI’s technology, Jaffe said.

“We’re aiming for accuracy and we’re aiming for safety. The main thing we are banking on is the large language models are improving at a rate that [is] unprecedented in terms of technological development,” he said. The technology has “vastly improved… from a safety perspective,” he added.

DreamDiary.com, Ingenio’s dream interpretations site, has a disclosure on its About Us section that its pages were “produced in part with the help of large AI language models.”

“After generating each interpretation, our team has received, edited and revised the interpretation, and takes responsibility for the dream interpretations to the site,” it reads.

Ingenio is also saving money by using generative AI to produce content, Jaffe said.

“We can publish faster than ever before. We can publish [for] less expensive than ever before. We can publish in some cases close to the same quality as ever before. We can publish 1,000 articles for the cost of what one article used to cost to produce,” he said.

However, Jaffe denied that AI will take people’s jobs: “I don’t think AI is going to take anyone’s job. I think people using AI may take people’s jobs, and the jobs getting replaced will be tedious ones.”

Creating an AI spiritual guide chatbot

After the successful launch of ChatGPT, Ingenio began developing a spiritual guide chatbot. Within the next two weeks, Ingenio will launch the chatbot, called Veda. It will be able to personalize content based on a user’s birth chart.