First Social Media, Now AI. Will News Reporting Survive This Latest Parasite?
Newspapers have been dying from theft of their work. Little knowledge of what is happening in the world is the logical outcome.
Just after Christmas, The New York Times opened a new front in the yearslong war between news publishing companies and Internet platforms that have appropriated their reporting without compensation. The Times sued Microsoft and the AI development company, OpenAI, in which Microsoft is heavily invested, for helping themselves without authorization to millions of Times articles to build the large language models that feed the companies' generative-AI engine, OpenAI's ChatGPT.
At a time when hundreds of news outlets have been shuttered during this new century, driven out by Americans getting their news from social media, and now even unlikely sources such as Instagram and TikTok, AI is seen as a new parasite even more deadly.
“Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism”, the complaint says.
“Times journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year…Defendants have effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars that The Times invested in creating that work by taking it without permission or compensation."
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In the years of struggle with free-riding social media, readers of their news feeds could at least click through to publisher websites which could earn revenue through advertising adjacent to articles and by selling direct subscriptions. The AI threat is that instead of sending the reader to a publisher website to read an article, it sucks in the publisher's copyrighted work from its vast datasets to write summaries that may suffice for readers. The publisher is shut out.
Since May, Google has segregated 10 million users to test an AI product called "Search Generative Experience", which it openly says it intends to merge into its search engine. Publishers see the legal dilemma of Google responding to inquiries with summary answers that are… Click to continue reading