News Corp is leading negotiations with global digital players to ensure publishers of premium content get a slice of the action when it comes to training AI (artificial intelligence).
The global media group argues that publishers should be compensated for the content being scrapped from the internet and then used to enhance the returns from AI.
The big digital platforms, including Google, Microsoft and Meta, are in a race to lead in the use of AI.
The spoils are attractive. Meta says AI-recommended content, from accounts not followed by a user, is now the fastest growing category of content on Facebook's feed. This has driven a 7% increase in overall time spent on the platform.
In advertising the global agency groups are adopting AI faster than many analysts predicted.
Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, revealed the state of negotiations for a cut of the pie when releasing June quarter results in New York.
He indicated the talks are going well, so far, with executives at the largest digital companies apparently seeing the complexities of using AI.
The pitch is that AI needs quality content, with regular updates.
“Generative AI has the potential to recycle itself in what you might call endless, perfidious permutations, and that's why the provenance of the archival base is so crucial and why refreshing daily, weekly, with incremental improvements is imperative,” Thomson told analysts.
“The potential is enormous, but garbage in, garbage out, and garbage all about.”
Thomson says we need to take care that AI doesn't lead to the decomposition of creativity and integrity.
“This is an important moment in the history of news and knowledge, with commercial and social implications, and a profound impact on creativity and integrity,” he says.
“If fake news and deep fakes are a concern, the potential for sophisticated forgeries, for counterfeit content is almost endless.
“We've invested billions of dollars in knowledge creation, actually tens of billions of dollars, and that content certainly has a value in this editorial epoch.”
News Corp has undergone “profound change” in the last decade with digital now accounting for more than 50% of the company’s revenue.
“That momentum is surely gathering pace in the age of generative AI, which we believe presents a remarkable opportunity to create a new stream of revenues, while allowing us to reduce costs across the business,” he says.
“We are already in active negotiations to establish a value for our unique content sets and IP that will play a crucial role in the future of AI.”
News Corp led the quest for compensation for content from the big digital platforms which ended with significant payments from major platforms including Google.
“Clearly negotiations are well underway with the relevant companies and, once again, News Corp hopes to set precedents that benefit creators, publishers and journalists around the globe,” Thomson says.
“We have been characteristically candid about the AI challenge to publishers and to intellectual property.
“It is essentially a tech triptych. In the first instance, our content is being harvested and scraped and otherwise ingested to train AI engines. Ingestion should not lead to indigestion.
“Secondly, individual stories are being surfaced in specific searches.
“And, thirdly, original content can be synthesised and presented as distinct when it is actually an extracting of our editorial essence.
“These super snippets, distilling the effort and insight of great journalism, are potentially designed so the reader will never visit a news site, thus fatally undermining journalism and damaging our societies.”
Thomson says there is no doubt that AI articulations will affect most sections of most companies, whether it be customer service, subscription management, chatbots, chitchatbots, text to audio and audio to video.
“Experiences, efficiencies will be exponential,” he says.
“And, we are absolutely clear, in our company, there must be a confluence of the technological, the commercial and the cultural."
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