People walk past The New York Times building in New York City.
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Editor leaders prepare for chaos as they consider guardrails to protect their content from AI-driven aggregation and disinformation.
The New York Times and NBC News are among organizations holding preliminary talks with other media companies, major technology platforms and Digital Content Next, the digital news trade industry association, to develop rules on how their content can be used by natural language artificial intelligence tools, people said familiar with the case.
The latest trend – generative AI – can create seemingly new blocks of text or images in response to complex questions such as “Write an earnings report in the style of poet Robert Frost” or “Draw a picture of the iPhone as depicted by Vincent Van Gogh.”
Some of these generative AI programs, such as Open AIs ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are trained on large amounts of publicly available information from the Internet, including journalism and copyrighted art. In some cases, the generated material is even taken almost verbatim from these sources.
Publishers fear these programs could undermine their business models by publishing recycled content without credit and creating an explosion of inaccurate or misleading content, eroding trust in online news.
Digital Content Next, which stands for more than 50 of the largest US media organizations including The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal older News Corp., this week published seven principles for “Developing and Managing Generative AI.” They address issues of security, intellectual property compensation, transparency, accountability, and fairness.
The principles are intended as a guide for future discussion. They include: “Publishers have the right to negotiate and receive fair compensation for the use of their IP” and “GAI system implementers must be held accountable for system outputs” rather than industry-defining rules. Digital Content Next shared the principles with its board and relevant committees on Monday.
Newscasts battle against AI
Digital Content Next’s “Principles for Developing and Managing Generative AI”:
- Developers and users of GAI must respect creators’ rights to their content.
- Publishers have the right to negotiate and receive fair compensation for the use of their IP.
- Copyright laws protect content creators from unauthorized use of their content.
- GAI systems must be transparent to publishers and users.
- Users of GAI systems must be held responsible for system output.
- GAI systems must not create or risk creating unfair market or competitive outcomes.
- GAI systems must be secure and address privacy risks.
The urgency behind building a system of rules and standards for generative AI is great, says Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next.
“I’ve never seen anything go from being an emerging problem to dominating so many workflows in my time as CEO,” said Kint, who has led Digital Content Next since 2014. “We’ve had 15 meetings since February. All media.”
How generative AI will unfold in the coming months and years is dominating the media conversation, said Axios CEO Jim VandeHei.
“Four months ago I didn’t think or talk about AI. Now it’s all we talk about,” said VandeHei. “If you’re running a business and AI isn’t something you’re obsessed with, then you’re crazy.”
Lessons from the past
Generative AI offers both potential efficiencies and threats to the news business. The technology can create new content – such as games, travel lists and recipes – that provide consumer benefits and help save costs.
But the media industry is equally concerned about AI threats. Digital media companies have seen their business models fail in recent years, mainly as social media and search companies Google And Facebook, reaped the rewards of digital advertising. Vice went bankrupt last month and news site BuzzFeed stocks have traded below $1 for more than 30 days and the company has received notice of delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Against that backdrop, media leaders such as IAC Chairman Barry Diller and News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson is urging Big Tech companies to pay for any content they use to train AI models.
“I am still amazed that so many media companies, some of them now mortally under water, have been reluctant to advocate for their journalism or for the reform of a clearly dysfunctional digital advertising market,” Thomson said in his opening address to the International News. Media Association’s World Congress of News Media in New York on May 25.
Speaking at a Semafor conference in New York in April, Diller said the news industry should band together to demand payment sooner rather than later, or threaten to sue under copyright law.
“What you need to do is let the industry say you can’t scrape our content until you work out systems where the publisher gets a way to pay,” Diller said. “If you really take it [AI] systems, and you don’t tie them into a process where there’s a way to be compensated for them, then everything is lost.”
Fighting disinformation
Balance concerns aside, the main AI concern for news organizations is alerting users to what is real and what is not.
“Basically I am optimistic about this as a technology for us, with the big caveat that the technology poses huge risks to journalism when it comes to verifying the authenticity of content,” said Chris Berend, head of digital at NBC News Group, who added added that he expects AI to work alongside people in the newsroom rather than replace them.
There are already signs of AI’s potential to spread misinformation. Last month, a verified Twitter account called “Bloomberg Feed” popped up tweeted a fake photo of an explosion at the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. Although this photo was quickly debunked as a fake, it led to a brief drop in stock prices. More sophisticated counterfeits can cause even more confusion and unnecessary panic. They can also damage brands. “Bloomberg Feed” had nothing to do with the media company Bloomberg LP.
“This is the beginning of what’s going to be hellfire,” VandeHei said. “This country is going to see a mass proliferation of mass garbage. Is this real or is this not real? Add this to a society that’s already thinking about what’s real or what’s not real.”
The U.S. government can regulate Big Tech’s development of AI, but the pace of regulation will likely lag the rate at which the technology is adopted, VandeHei said.
This country will experience a massive proliferation of mass waste. Is this real or is this not real? Add this to a society that is already thinking about what is real or not real.
Technology companies and newsrooms are working to combat potentially destructive AI, as recently invented Pope Francis’s photo wearing a large puffer jacket. Google said last month it will encrypt information that will allow users to decipher whether an image has been created with AI.
disneyABC News of ABC News “already has a team working around the clock verifying the veracity of online videos,” said Chris Looft, coordinating producer, visual verification, at ABC News.
“Even with AI tools or generative AI models that work in text, like ChatGPT, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re already doing this work,” said Looft. “The process remains the same, to combine reporting with visual techniques to confirm the veracity of video. This means picking up the phone and talking to eyewitnesses or analyzing metadata.”
Ironically, one of the first uses of AI to take over human labor in the newsroom could be fighting AI itself. NBC News’ Berend predicts that there will be an arms race of “AI-control-AI” in the coming years as both media and technology companies invest in software that can distinguish and label real from fake.
“The fight against disinformation is one of computing power,” said Berend. “One of the central challenges when it comes to content verification is a technology challenge. It’s such a big challenge that it has to be done through partnership.”
The confluence of rapidly evolving powerful technology, input from dozens of key companies, and regulation by the US government has led some media executives to privately acknowledge that the next few months could get very messy. The hope is that the current age of digital maturity can help bring solutions faster than in the early days of the Internet.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of the NBC News Group, which includes both NBC News and CNBC.
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