ARLnow is discontinuing its AI-generated morning newsletter, though we’re not ruling out an eventual return.
We announced the email just over a year ago, with the twin goals of testing artificial intelligence capabilities and serving readers who wanted a morning email with more of a “voice.”
The morning email was the “Today Show” to the “Nightly News” of our popular afternoon email, which consists mostly of headlines, photos and links.
The email was produced every morning in an entirely automated process that utilized AI summaries of ARLnow articles from the day before. The summaries were generated via ChatGPT APIs in a writing style somewhat similar to that of Morning Brew.
In many ways, the morning email was a success.
- Open rates were higher than the afternoon email.
- Despite providing full summaries, click rates were only ~25% lower than the afternoon email.
- The AI did a reasonably good job of summarizing stories.
There were, however, some negatives.
- It proved difficult to get the AI to set a time context — despite our efforts to fix it, the AI still often wrote about stories from days ago as if they happened today.
- The “tone” of the writing could often be described as cringe-y or corny. We were able to improve this over time but it still was hard to get it to match our preferred writing style.
- There were occasional factual inaccuracies, mostly from the AI making assumptions not fully supported by the facts.
- Despite solid open and click rates, we saw little growth in the subscriber list, even when we were actively promoting it.
In the end, it’s clear that most readers are more interested in simple headlines from stories that happened today rather than voice-y summaries of things that happened yesterday. And while production of the email is automated, it still requires monitoring, maintenance, and API fees.
So in order to better focus our efforts on more productive pursuits, the email is set to be turned off later this week. This will coincide with the launch of our new Afternoon Update email format.
Down the road, as AI technology continues to improve, we may bring back the morning email, if there appears to be newfound reader demand for it.
In the meantime, thank you to everyone who subscribed and provided feedback.
