Apart from unwillingly handing over its revenue to transnational digital platforms, the journalism industry is also facing challenges from generative artificial intelligence (AI).
These AI tools generate content to replace news media after using a large amount of news content to conduct modularized training, and yet most AI companies do not pay for the rights to use the content they train their models on.
Facing such unfair treatment, news outlets from different countries have started to fight for their rights. Google was fined 250 million euros (US$268 million) in March by French regulators for breaching an agreement to pay media companies for reproducing their content online, and for training on content from publishers and news agencies without notifying them.
This is the latest action from France’s competition watchdog against Google for its disputes over payments to news agencies.
The New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal district court, claims that the firms train AI chatbots using articles published by the paper without its permission.
The New York Times is reportedly claiming billions of dollars in damages. From the paper’s perspective, the companies seek to have a “free ride” on its investment in journalism.
US writers and comedians have also said AI companies use their work to generate content that imitates their style without compensating them despite making profit from it.
News agencies in our country have recently demanded transnational digital platforms pay for their content. They have also started reviewing to what extent their content is used to train AI tools, in what ways they should be compensated and what legal options they could resort to.
What we could learn from these international lawsuits is that individual news outlets should not be left alone when they negotiate with transnational digital platforms. State power should be exercised proportionately in this process to fight for a satisfactory result for news outlets in our country.
Despite having massive resources, transnational digital platforms provide little compensation to media companies. The government should not allow press agencies to be at the mercy of digital platforms.
The government should ensure news outlets are able to maintain sustainable and reasonable revenue by legislating for it — bargaining for their share of revenue should come first. This is the only way to support a democratic society and a healthy media industry.
Dino Wei works in the information technology industry.
Translated by Fion Khan
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