Around a fifth of the staff at Europe’s highest-circulation newspaper, Bild, are being fired by owners Axel Springer SE, which also owns influential U.S. publications such as POLITICO and Business Insider. The move is part of a drive to replace human workers with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“[U]nfortunately [we will] be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes,” Axel Springer told Bild staff in an email leaked to a rival German publication.
The firings are expected to slash around 200 jobs from the tabloid’s formerly 1,000-strong workforce, and follows Axel Springer boss Mathias Döpfner declaring that AI “has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was – or simply replace it” earlier this year.
Döpfner is a friend of Twitter owner Elon Musk, urging him to buy the social media platform and offering to run it for him before he took it over.