AI Poses New Threats To Newsrooms

Newsroom leaders are preparing for chaos as they consider guardrails to protect their content against artificial intelligence-driven aggregation and disinformation, reports CNBC.

The New York Times and NBC News are among the organizations holding preliminary talks with other media companies, large technology platforms and Digital Content Next, the industry’s digital news trade organization, to develop rules around how their content can be used by natural language artificial intelligence tools, according to people familiar with the matter.

The latest trend — generative AI — can create seemingly novel blocks of text or images in response to complex queries such as “Write an earnings report in the style of poet Robert Frost” or “Draw a picture of the iPhone as rendered by Vincent Van Gogh.”

Some of these generative AI programs, such as Open AI’s 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 actually lifted almost verbatim from these sources.

Publishers fear these programs could undermine their business models by publishing repurposed content without credit and creating an explosion of inaccurate or misleading content, decreasing trust in news online.

Digital Content Next, which represents more than 50 of the largest U.S. media organizations including The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, this week published seven principles for “Development and Governance of Generative AI.” They address issues around safety, compensation for intellectual property, transparency, accountability and fairness.

The principles are meant to be an avenue for future discussion. They include: “Publishers are entitled to negotiate for and receive fair compensation for use of their IP” and “Deployers of GAI systems should be held accountable for system outputs” rather than industry-defining rules. Digital Content Next shared the principles with its board and relevant committees Monday.