In his speech at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in June, A.G. Sulzberger warned that AI companies are violating settled law and urged news organisations to stand up for their rights to ensure a sustainable future for reporting.
In his excellent speech, which the New York Times has given permission for us to publish in the July / August issue of InPublishing magazine, the New York Times publisher made lots of salient points, including:
- “Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own.”
- “Our profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the A.I. revolution.”
- “In its competition with China, America weakens itself by abandoning the intellectual property protections that fuel innovation and power America’s creative enterprises.”
- “As A.I. companies are doubtless aware, most news organisations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights.”
- “In the A.I. era, Google increasingly uses the content of news organisations and other websites to answer questions directly.”
- “Meta alone now makes eight times more in ad revenue than every newspaper on earth combined.”
- “The vast majority of news publishers say they expect no significant income from A.I. platforms.”
- “Because A.I. tends to be bad at expressing uncertainty, it’s often not just wrong, but confidently wrong.”
- “Two-thirds of Americans are highly concerned about A.I. spreading inaccurate information, according to Pew Research Center.”
- “Evidence shows that when a local news organisation fails, people in a community start to trust each other less and hate each other more.”
- “Intellectual property rights must hold if our profession is to have a path forward.”
- “The VC firm behind many A.I. investments is now the top political donor in the United States.”
- “There’s nothing inherently bad about A.I. technology – it’s the actions of the companies behind it that need reforming.”
- “To be a destination in a world intermediated by A.I., you’ll need journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity.”
- “The internet is already overwhelmed by bots and slop. It is becoming harder and harder to know where things came from and whether they are true.”
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. What news organisations do is something worth fighting for. A.G. Sulzberger said he “remained convinced of the value created by quality news organisations dedicated to the hard, expensive work of original reporting.”
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