Image: Buzzfeed
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But that’s not why this partnership is interesting. It gets interesting when you consider how Whisper’s content has already been used by BuzzFeed—take a look at “21 Outrageous Party Confessions to Get You Amped for the Weekend” or “25 Things People Do In the Bathroom That Are Better Than Going to the Bathroom.” There’s even less writing on those posts than there are on your standard BuzzFeed list. The authors are serving as little more than content curators. So why not automate the process?The obvious answer is one of quality control—there's an incredible amount of inane nonsense on Whisper, so, for now, any Whisper-based post is going to require a set of human eyes to make sure it fits whatever theme BuzzFeed is going for. There's no guarantee that algorithms will ever be able to create a coherent list.But BuzzFeed and other sites focused on creating viral content already employ a shotgun mentality for a lot of this stuff—and endure a lot of criticism for it (while laughing all the way to the bank when a post with 50 words in it racks up 10 million views). Zimmerman and Whisper think they can make it possible to make that process a robotic one.“We will be moving to automation at some point,” Zimmerman said. “We’re working on an API that will be made available to partners to access the Whisper database that will be able to search it accurately and do anything we can do in house. Right now it’s just in the planning stages.”Zimmerman and Whisper are about to make it possible for the arm slinging that shit to be a robotic one, not a human one.
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