The Independent’s UK editor has said stories on its new AI-written summarisation service, Bulletin, often outperform the human-written content on which they are based.
The service, which uses Google’s Gemini to rewrite regular Independent stories into five to ten bullet points, officially launched on Wednesday following a soft launch over recent weeks.
Independent UK editor Chloe Hubbard told an audience at Advertising Week in London that the new product “works commercially”.
“Just this week our Bulletin team created, in one day, a million article views,” Hubbard said. “That’s lucrative. That washes its face, right?”
Hubbard said the stories had been surfacing on Google Discover, the aggregation service that has been driving substantial traffic to some publishers over the last year, and chief executive Christian Broughton told Press Gazette that in some cases Bulletin stories had been beating their human-written counterparts on Google search.
Bulletin is currently only accessible through the Independent website, with a section of the homepage below the Lifestyle & Culture rail dedicated to the service. It will ultimately move onto a dedicated domain, Broughton said, with plans underway for an app and eventually audio briefings.
The AI rewrites are bylined to the same journalist who originally wrote the story and link through to the original version. Broughton said the same human editor edits both the original and Bulletin versions of a story.
Independent’s Bulletin news service hopes to compete with Google AI Overviews
Hubbard said Bulletin came about because “lots of people want to read about things, but they don’t necessarily have the time to read 2,000 words…
“So we decided to look at how we might be able to give people our content – fully trusted, verified, fact-checked content – in a more condensed form that would potentially rival the summaries you may also see when you Google things, for instance. But we would know the source of truth for that content would be our own journalism.”
She added that a journalist checks the content before publication “to make sure that the AI hasn’t actually accidentally done something that isn’t right – which it doesn’t do, which is interesting”.
Hubbard said “we select the content based on what we think the audience might not have the time to go through”, with a greater focus on “chewier”, more difficult topics rather than celebrity stories or something intended to take time to read like a feature.
At time of writing, leading articles on the Bulletin page included AI-written summaries of stories about new US tariffs, a drop in Tesla sales and climate change. However there were also some articles on lighter subjects, some of them appearing under the “curiosity gap” headlines that often do well on Google Discover, for example “Jeremy Clarkson’s surprising weight loss snack after quitting Ozempic” and “Malcolm in the Middle star seen for first time in nearly 20 years”.
Hubbard said the Bulletin AI tool was “becoming a really good journalist”.
“Often we’re seeing the Bulletin version of the main Independent story will do better. The audience is preferring that one. So it’s like the AI is a very good journalist.”
Broughton said The Independent had briefly tried a similar idea using a human writer a decade ago. The i Paper, now part of DMGT, originally launched as a sister to The Independent with a similar focus on brevity and serving time-poor readers.
He dismissed any suggestion Bulletin might be used to reduce journalist numbers, pointing to the seven jobs The Independent says it has hired specifically to staff Bulletin. (One of these roles is taken up with Bulletin’s presence on WeAre8, a social media platform and partner for the news service.)
Broughton said: “If we just reduced down we’d kill The Independent. The Independent is only on a growth agenda.”
[Read more: Former Independent editor says AI will free up reporters to create more ‘guff’]
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
