Why The Guardian’s first reader-facing AI product isn’t a chatbot

Why The Guardian’s first reader-facing AI product isn’t a chatbot

From The Digiday Podcast by Digiday

March 31, 2026 · 32 min

About this episode

The episode discusses The Guardian's approach to AI, focusing on their new product Storylines and the decision to avoid chatbots.

The Guardian didn’t want to build an AI chatbot. Not a reader-facing one anyway. Not at the risk of that chatbot misrepresenting the news publisher’s journalism and undermining readers’ trust. “We’re not going to die if we don’t build a chatbot tomorrow. We need to be really clear about what the threats are externally, but ultimately what we have is something that’s worth protecting,” said Chris Moran, head of editorial innovation at The Guardian, during a live recording of the Digiday Podcast at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, on March 23. While not a chatbot, The Guardian has begun to roll out its first reader-facing AI product. But it doesn’t really look like an AI product. Called Storylines, the product is an AI-generated spin on the related links module common to publishers’ pages. It currently appears on a subset of The Guardian’s so-called “tag” pages, which typically list articles related to a given topic, such as “Trump,” in reverse-chronological order. Amid this article feed is an unassuming box with a selection of related articles threaded to a given narrative or storyline.

People in this episode

Host: Digiday

Guest: Chris Moran

Topics covered

  • AI products
  • journalism
  • reader trust
  • digital innovation
  • media strategy

Keywords

  • AI
  • The Guardian
  • Storylines
  • journalism
  • reader-facing product
  • digital media
  • trust

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Guardian

Places: Vail, Colorado

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