Two years into the gen AI revolution, many news organizations are experimenting with artificial intelligence, hoping to redefine what the news experience can look like.
Sara Beykpour believes that AI can enable greater personalization and interaction. That’s why the entrepreneur—and Twitter and Vine alumnus—recently launched the news app Particle, with co-founder Marcel Molina.
“We’re a news aggregator that includes links to the different sources that cover a story,” Beykpour says. “We don’t summarize individual articles.”
Particle focuses on stories rather than individual articles, offering users multiple perspectives on a single topic. “What Particle does is it reads the news from all over. It summarizes a story for you. So it's really based around a story instead of an individual article, and it brings you multiple perspectives about that story,” she adds.
The app has two tabs: one lets you customize your feed to focus on the news you care about, and the other shows the stories everyone’s talking about.
However, Beykpour says the app is careful not to let users create their own echo chambers; for political stories, for instance, the sources are varied.
“If you want your main feed to focus only on entertainment, that’s your choice. What’s really important, and something we are mindful about, is that for stories with a political element, we ensure the sources are varied so that you always get a broad perspective,” she explains.
Personalization, of course, is nothing new for news aggregators. Apple News mixes human and algorithmic curation Artifact, founded by the creators of Instagram, set out to customize the news experience for younger audiences before shuttering earlier this year, though its AI personalization tech has been integrated into the Yahoo news app.
“We love all those apps,” says Beykpour. “Our focus is on building an app that makes keeping up with the news effortless for users. Part of that is showing, as simply as possible, the political spectrum of a story. But that’s just one piece of a larger puzzle, which includes other critical features like focusing on stories, personalization, summaries, questions and everything else Particle offers.”
Robyn McRae, Global VP of Paid Media and Marketing Automation at IBM, highlights the value of showcasing different perspectives, like the newsletter The Flip Side: “I find it helpful when [a story] shares both sides of a topic or an issue,” she says.
AI has become a major focus for news organizations in recent months, with many publishers introducing AI-focused roles or teams within their editorial operations (see, for example, The New York Times or Hearst). OpenAI, meanwhile, has signed partnerships with major publishers in the US and globally—including Condé Nast, Axel Springer, Le Monde and The Atlantic—providing journalistic content in OpenAI’s products.
As AI-powered news evolves, the search experience is also set to change. Companies like Perplexity are experimenting with integrating news into their AI search engines so that users can have access to the latest news from credible sources. This was brought to life in the company’s recent Election Information Hub, for which they partnered with the AP and the nonprofit Democracy Works. Last summer, the company also launched a partnership program with publishers to share revenue when their content is referenced and give them access to their API.
Even as AI-powered search gains traction, however, many of the possibilities in this space remain untapped, says Chris Hay, Distinguished Engineer at IBM.
“News is going to need a personalized UI experience,” he says. “If I think of a list of 20 news stories I’m interested in, I’d like a list in a visual, beautiful way ... I don't want a big load of text; I want to see a quick browse. That’s the challenge: how to solve browsability within AI-driven search experiences. That’s what’s going to disrupt search.”
