“Don’t Get Screwed Again”: News Publishers Are Banding Together in the Face of AI Threat

Publishers, according to Diller, need to band together and declare: “You cannot scrape our content, you cannot take it, you cannot take it transformatively…you cannot take it and use it in real time to actually cannibalize everything.”

This notion of banding together also entered the bloodstream during Jessica Lessin’s annual gathering of news leaders a few weekends ago, hosted at the Information CEO’s rustic-chic home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was an off-the-record who’s who of Gen X and elder-millennial media luminaries, who lounged on beanbag chairs, high-top stools, and a large cozy sectional: Ben Smith, Lydia Polgreen, Jesse Angelo, S. Mitra Kalita, Nicholas Carlson, Brian Stelter, Kevin Delaney, Sam Jacobs, Rebecca Blumenstein, Noah Shachtman, and so on, along with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Talk of AI was heavy in the air, I’m told, and during one freewheeling session, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn caused some of his fellow attendees to prick up their ears when he speculated about a group effort among publishers to “make sure they don’t get screwed again,” as one person who was present summarized Kahn’s remarks. (Another attendee noted that “Joe doesn’t talk a lot in these things, so when he does, you kind of listen.”)

The Times didn’t have anything to add for this story, but a spokesman shared a memo that went out to employees on June 7 and described a “cross-company effort” related to AI, which will sort through questions including: “How do we ensure that companies that use generative AI respect our intellectual property, brands, reader relationships and investments?” The trade group Digital Content Next—whose members include the Times, NBCUniversal News Group, The Washington Post, BBC News, Axel Springer, Bloomberg, Condé Nast (the parent company of Vanity Fair), and numerous other major media organizations—recently issued a set of “principles for development and governance of generative AI.” Among these: “Publishers are entitled to negotiate for and receive fair compensation for use of their IP,” and “copyright laws protect content creators from the unlicensed use of their content.”

To get a better sense of some of the legal nuances at play, I spoke to a pair of lawyers currently working on this issue. They said publishers are looking at three ways in which AI is harvesting their journalism: the training of large language models, the surfacing of content in response to search queries, and the synthesizing of content to create summaries for the user. “There are imbalances in terms of our abilities to negotiate,” one of the lawyers said, “because historically, some of these platforms didn’t feel the need to come to the table because they’re so big. Do we have bargaining power to get them to pay us for the use of our content in training, surfacing, and synthesizing, or not? Do they care? There’s some issues there—copyright issues, competition issues. Section 230 will be a big thing.” 

“I don’t think any publisher would say that they produce content because they want to get paid for AI training,” the other lawyer added. “But economically, there’s a big problem here, because copyrighted content is private property, and it’s being used by commercial entities to create something that wasn’t licensed. In no other industry would we accept that private property is fair play as long as you build something else with it.” 

Another issue, of course, is that AI queries could theoretically supplant Google Search, thereby starving publishers of monetizable clicks. This would be particularly problematic for ad-supported mass-traffic publications like, say, Jimmy Finkelstein’s The Messenger, which is chasing an ambitious goal of 100 million unique monthly visitors.

I interviewed Finkelstein last month, and this next part didn’t make it into the published version of our chat, but here’s something that he floated: “I just took an airplane from Palm Beach. In the old days, you would google, ‘Is such and such a safe plane?’ Four publications would arise and you would decide which is the most credible, and you’d click on it and read the article and get an answer.” When using an AI chatbot instead of Google Search, he continued, “there’s no place to click! So that’s obviously an issue.” (See also: one of John Herrman’s latest Screen Time columns, “Will Google’s AI Plans Destroy the Media?”)

As discussions heat up between publishers, on the one hand, and AI platforms/AI developers, on the other, negotiations will presumably be informed by the hard-fought content skirmishes of yore. The lawyers I consulted said there’s now an “overarching view” and “fundamental optimism” that publishers will ultimately be able to prove the need for payments and create a structure to make that happen.

For what it’s worth, Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, has embarked on a charm offensive with lawmakers, even urging regulation of the AI technology he’s helping to shepherd into the world. He also appears to have cultivated relationships with media executives. During Diller’s Semafor appearance, Diller called Altman a “close friend” and said, “I think he’s sympathetic [to publishers], but also I think he realizes the dragon that he’s got.”

Thomson apparently has rubbed elbows with Altman as well. During the Q&A that followed Thomson’s prepared remarks at the World Congress of News Media in May, he mentioned that he’d met with Altman a couple of months earlier. Over a meal, Thomson recalled, they’d talked about AI’s “potential.”

A few beats later in the Q&A, Thomson emphasized the importance of comprehending not only the potential of AI but “the real dangers.” “I don’t think there’s going to be regulation of AI anytime soon,” he said. “I mean, AI at the moment is more ambiguity than anything else, and just—my experience of Washington, and I’ve been down there a lot in the last 15 years, is that there won’t be any coherent, cogent response in a regulatory way. So it’s going to be up to us, and certainly our journalists, to write about it, to explain it, and, as media companies, to advocate where appropriate.”