Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp, has spoken out about the risks of AI to publishers and media companies.
In a pair of interviews at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in San Francisco discussing News Corp's work in AI, Thomson said that as a content creation company that has valuable IP - particularly for news content and HarperCollins archive content - there are three areas in which there's a duty of care owed to News Corp.
"One is the Generative AI engines are training on archived material and extracting benefit from that. Two, they’re surfacing specific headlines. And three, they're also extracting editorial essence and repurposing and deriving value from that," he said.
"They’re deriving value from our creation. And so, there will be a big debate around that. The debate will play out in two ways: one, what's the value of the archive? And two, how much do you value updates?
"If you derive benefit from our content, we should derive a benefit or else you're in danger of undermining the creation of that content."
Thompon said there needs to be much more debate not just about the role of AI in companies, but about AI in journalism, because from 2008 to 2020, 57% of newsroom jobs in the United States have been lost.
"We're facing another wave, in this case a tsunami, potentially, of job losses because of the impact of AI," he said.
"And these are not just jobs lost, but it's insight lost. And so, it's important that all media companies understand the impact. But it's also incumbent on the big AI players to understand their impact.
"People have to understand that AI is essentially retrospective. It's about permutations of pre-existing content. The danger is, it’s rubbish in, rubbish out and in this case, rubbish all about. Because it's distributing – exponentially - potentially damaging content.
"And so instead of elevating and enhancing, what you might find is that you have this ever-shrinking circle of sanity surrounded by a reservoir of rubbish. So, instead of the insight that AI can potentially bring, what it will evolve into, essentially, is maggot-ridden mind mold."
Thomson said in newsrooms, understanding how AI is used as a tool is important, as it's what might be called a tech triptych in the way that content will be used.
"The big AI engines are going to scrape content to feed and update the engine, or they're going to surface individual stories, and they're going to extract the editorial essence," he said.
"And in each of those three areas, it's incumbent on the big players to reward those who created that content, or else they're actually undermining the act of creation.
"Clearly, advertising revenue has shifted from the creator to the distributor. And so it really is incumbent on these companies to recognise that responsibility, in the end, to their own products, and certainly to society.”
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