The team at Sweden’s Aftonbladet took on an interesting challenge this year: What if they picked a topic their audience typically does not engage with and built a chat product around it to drive engagement?

The result was Valkompisen, a GenAI “election buddy” chatbot that beat all expectations. Since its launch in May, it has answered more than 150,000 questions on the EU elections held in June. It could talk about the structure of the EU, the history of the EU, previous election results, current topics in the EU debate, votes in the EU Parliament, party groups, as well as the opinions of the Swedish parties on various issues and which candidates were running.

It used OpenAI’s GPT-4 and was trained on data from more than 100 sources collected by Aftonbladet’s journalists and developers. “It is based on official, reliable sources (and on answers to questions we put to the parties), and it is instructed not to make things up or fill in, which sometimes happens with the AI-powered chatbots,” said Martin Schori, associate publisher of Aftonbladet.

Reader education was part of the launch. The news brand helped readers by providing tips on how to write prompts and encouraged them to maintain a dialogue with the bot rather than giving up after one attempt to get an answer, while also telling them about the flaws inherent in GenAI bots.

It was not the obvious choice to invest “so much money and resources in a completely new product, based on a completely new behaviour and where we let go of some of the rigid control” over the quality of output, Schori said.

But Aftonbladet gained invaluable insight into what its readers were wondering about and is now looking at how else to use this technology. 

The Washington Post has also just launched a new chat product, this one focused on climate-related topics, ranging from climate change to carbon offsetting to recycling. 

Climate Answers will only give answers that are drawn from the Post’s own journalism and is aimed at bridging the gap between how the publisher writes about climate and the information its audience is seeking.

It is worth noting the news company is being very transparent with its readers about the objectives of the bot.

“The Washington Post has been publishing coverage of the climate and environment for more than two decades. We know that readers may have questions that aren’t always easy to answer,” the newspaper said in a message to readers. 

“This tool searches the past eight years of our articles and ranks the results based on relevancy. We then use a large language model to write a response to match the query you have posed.

“Our intent is not to replace the critical role our journalists play but to offer readers new ways to engage with the work we have already published. How can AI allow us to surface answers from our deep trove of reporting? What types of reader journeys do we make possible via a novel search interface?”

If users spot an error, they can provide feedback to the Post via a feedback form. “This is an experiment we are releasing so we can learn from you how to improve the experience. We expect it may not always function exactly as we hope — which is why we are asking you to confirm with the published articles.”

Climate Answers was launched after the newspaper found that new formats for its content work well to engage younger readers — for example, they prefer story summaries over headlines in determining whether to read further. The Post’s senior editor for AI strategy and innovation, Phoebe Connelly, used to head its Next Generation initiative, which was aimed at attracting younger readers.  

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