BuzzFeed shows off AI apps at SXSW, but the audience shrugs

BuzzFeed, once the king of viral content on the internet, tried to stake out a new role for itself: AI app developer. At SXSW in Austin, the company introduced two new products, BF Island and Conjure. The room's reaction was subdued, but the media company is clearly betting on AI as a lifeline.

SXSW, an annual technology and culture festival in Texas, is traditionally a venue for high-profile debuts. This year BuzzFeed chose it to showcase a new strategic turn.

BF Island is an AI social platform. The concept resembles an interactive island with characters and narratives generated by artificial intelligence. Conjure is positioned as a tool for creating AI content, effectively a competitor to Midjourney and Character.ai, but aimed at a mass casual audience.

The problem is that the demos did not make the expected impression. Conference attendees reacted quietly: no buzz, no sharp skepticism, just indifference. For a company that once set internet trends, that is a particularly telling result.

BuzzFeed's recent history is a story of structural crisis in digital media. The company thrived in the mid-2010s, when viral quizzes, explainers and news investigations drew hundreds of millions of readers. But the advertising model proved vulnerable: Facebook's algorithms changed, traffic fell, and investors began demanding profits. In 2023, BuzzFeed shut down BuzzFeed News, a division that had won a Pulitzer Prize. Waves of layoffs followed.

CEO Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post and the architect of BuzzFeed's viral machine, publicly acknowledged that the company's future is tied to AI. In 2023 he wrote an internal memo saying that AI would personalize and improve BuzzFeed's content. That stirred discontent in the newsroom at the time. Now, in 2026, the words have turned into products.

But the central question is this: how is BuzzFeed different from the dozens of other companies already offering AI tools for content creation and social interaction? Character.ai has hundreds of millions of users. Midjourney, Runway and Adobe Firefly are mature products with established audiences. Who will come to BF Island or Conjure specifically because the logo says BuzzFeed?

Skeptics point to another problem. The term AI slop, slang for mass-generated, meaningless content flooding the internet, made it into the headline of TechCrunch's piece on these products. That a respected outlet applies it to BuzzFeed's new releases says a lot. A company that once invented formats now risks becoming a producer of digital noise.

On the other hand, media companies have to move somewhere. The traditional advertising model is dying. Subscriptions work only for a narrow circle of publications with unique reputations. AI tools and AI platforms are one of the few real paths to monetization open to old media brands. BuzzFeed has name recognition, an audience and experience with mass-market content. If the products turn out to be good enough, the strategy could work.

For now, the market is watching. SXSW is only a debut. The real test for BF Island and Conjure will come with actual users. Its outcome will determine whether BuzzFeed finds a new life in the AI era or ends up as another example of internet media giants that failed to manage the technological transition.

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