The publishing industry's relationship with artificial intelligence has entered an awkward phase — not quite estranged, but perhaps sleeping in separate bedrooms after a few uncomfortable incidents.

Forbes is the latest to attempt reconciliation, introducing "The Daily Brief," an AI-generated audio news summary that uses the publisher's internal tool, called Bertie, to select and voice three stories each day. The product, which went live on May 29, represents a bet that listeners might welcome a robot summarizing the news on their morning commute, provided a human has checked its work first.

That last provision is not incidental. Lauren Soni, the senior vice president of product and technology at Forbes, said her team had studied what happened at The Washington Post, where an AI-powered customizable podcast introduced last December quickly became a case study in what can go wrong when algorithms are left unsupervised. The Post's product was found to contain errors and what the industry now politely calls "hallucinations" — a term that makes factual mistakes sound almost whimsical.

"A lot of the pitfalls can come from a rush to speed to market," Ms. Soni said, in what might qualify as understatement.

Forbes is also pitching advertisers on the product, discussing pre-roll spots and sponsorship labels. Whether brands will bite remains uncertain. Glenn Rubenstein, the founder of the podcast advertising agency Adopter Media, noted that the audience for such products is unproven, and pointed out a mild irony: listeners could simply ask ChatGPT directly what is happening in the news.

(What, you were expecting the robots to create demand for themselves?)

Two weeks in, Forbes says The Daily Brief ranks among the top five most-engaged features on its homepage. The publisher has also used AI tools to rebuild its Real-Time Billionaires database, which now features interactive filters and has seen its click-through rate rise from 1 percent to 24 percent.

Whether any of this amounts to a sustainable business model or simply a more efficient way to arrange deck chairs remains, as always, a matter for the next quarterly earnings call.

Original story published in Digiday: "AI podcast experiments march on with Forbes' new daily audio briefing"