In an open letter published on Wednesday, a consortium of the world’s major news media organizations demanded revised regulations on the use of copyrighted material by artificial intelligence (AI) developers.
Industry heavyweights including the News Media Alliance, boasting nearly 2,000 US publications, and the European Publishers’ Council, signed the communique. These organizations advocate for a legal framework that allows media companies to collectively negotiate with AI model operators over the use of their intellectual property.
In the letter, they stated, “Generative AI and large language models … disseminate that content and information to their users, often without any consideration of, remuneration to, or attribution to the original creators. Such practices undermine the media industry’s core business models.”
AI services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard use generative AI to produce a vast amount of online content. This surge in AI-generated content has prompted several industries to assess its impact on their businesses.
Many of these AI services do not disclose the inputs used to train their models. Prior versions of these models reportedly utilized datasets comprising billions of pieces of information scraped from the internet, including content from news websites.
Despite generative AI’s broad adoption—with numerous companies launching features based on this technology—governments worldwide are still deliberating on appropriate regulatory measures.
This push for revised regulations mirrors the news media industry’s ongoing effort to secure more equitable deals with tech giants such as Meta Platforms (META) and Alphabet (GOOGL). These platforms have frequently been accused by publishers of monopolizing news content without adequately sharing profits. Legislation like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, currently under consideration by U.S. lawmakers, aims to allow smaller news publishers and broadcasters to negotiate ad rates with tech behemoths like Google and Facebook.
As the debate rumbles on, news companies are starting to explore generative AI and broker deals for their content to be used in AI model training. The Associated Press, a signatory of the open letter, recently entered an agreement with OpenAI to license a portion of AP’s story archive and explore the potential of generative AI in news. OpenAI has also pledged $5 million to the American Journalism Project (AJP) in a partnership aimed at exploring ways to bolster local news through AI.
