AI was hardly on the media’s radar last year, but concerns around tools like ChatGPT have fast become top of mind. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that a group of companies including the New York Times, Journal parent News Corp, Axel Springer, and IAC were discussing forming a new coalition to address whether news content should be used to train the technology—and how publishers should be compensated for that content. And on Sunday, Semafor reported that the coalition, which may launch a lawsuit and “press for legislative action,” is close to being formalized.
The publishers are being led by billionaire media mogul and IAC founder Barry Diller himself, according to Semafor. “The most immediate threat they see is a possible shift at Google from sending traffic to web pages to simply answering users’ questions with a chatbot,” Semafor’s Ben Smith reports. For example, IAC CEO Joey Levin said, the chatbot could turn a Food & Wine review into a text-only, attribution-less recommendation of a bottle of wine. “The machine doesn’t drink any wine or swirl any wine or smell any wine,” Levin said. “Search was designed to find the best of the internet. These large language models, or generative AI, are designed to steal the best of the internet.”
The full make-up of the emerging media coalition, along with whether legal action results, remains to be seen. News Corp, for one, is not part of the coalition, a source familiar with the matter told Vanity Fair. Another source familiar with the matter confirmed that Axel Springer is part of the coalition. The New York Times declined to comment.
It’s not the first time that publishers have sought payment for tech platforms’ use of their content; between 2019 and 2022, Facebook doled out annual payments reportedly exceeding $20 million for the Times, $15 million for the Washington Post, and $10 million for the Journal. But this time, according to Semafor, publishers are looking for more. “If these breakthrough language models rely on their inputs, [publishers] argue, the share of the value they collect should be commensurate—and should run into the billions of dollars across the industry,” he wrote, noting that the publishers are “also threatening to try their luck in court, where complex questions about how copyright law applies to both the inputs to AI training and the outputs of AI models remain largely untested.” It’s also worth noting that tech executives still have yet to figure out a clear business model for AI, as that the technology is extremely costly to maintain. It is “very early days” for large language models, Google spokeswoman Jenn Crider told Semafor.
Still, AI companies aren’t showing any signs of slowing down, with the Times reporting last week on how several top news executives were disturbed by a demonstration of Google’s new AI article-writing tool. As my colleague Joe Pompeo wrote last month, industry leaders have been sounding the alarm both in public and private, including at Jessica Lessin’s annual gathering in Jackson Hole earlier this summer. Among the slew of news leaders present at the off-the-record shindig were Smith, Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, Rolling Stone’s Noah Shachtman, and Times executive editor Joe Kahn. Kahn, for his part, “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,’” Pompeo reported, with one attendee noting that Kahn “doesn’t talk a lot in these things, so when he does, you kind of listen.”
