News Corp and Open AI’s groundbreaking partnership puts The Washington Post’s parent company at the “leading edge of the digital age” at a time of upheaval across the news industry, CEO Robert Thomson said in a memo to employees.
The publishing giant’s deal with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, announced in May, allows ChatGPT’s creators to use current and archived content produced by News Corp-owned media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Sun and The Times of London, to answer user questions and train their AI models.
Thomson said the deal marks a “pivotal moment in recalibrating the world of search” long dominated by Google and will position News Corp to benefit from the rise of AI rather than “dancing with the digital apocalypse.”
“Provenance matters. Having a role in shaping the future is certainly preferable to being stuck in the past,” Thompson said.[Generative] AI is a threat, a real threat to journalism. Its ability to mimic and manipulate is limitless. We are at a particularly early stage in the evolution of AI, and that evolution is accelerating exponentially.”
The sudden decline in traffic and advertising revenue has led to mass layoffs and newsroom closures, affecting media outlets including Messenger, Vice and BuzzFeed.
While the growing influence of big tech companies is partly to blame, Thomson said the media industry has been slow to recognise the impact of AI and the “unstoppable rise of the mobile phone as a content canvas”.
“You all probably remember the stories about traditional media being fundamentally and fatally flawed and that cyber-savvy digital natives would triumph and dance on their digital grave,” Thompson says. “Deadspin is now completely dead, BuzzFeed is, well, a flop, Messenger launched with much hype but failed within months, Vice imploded and Pitchfork was panned.”
Thomson said the deal with OpenAI would demonstrate the importance of News Corp’s unique work, while also giving it access to technology that can help with everything from news delivery to customer service, marketing and advertising.
The Wall Street Journal reported in May that the five-year deal could be worth more than $250 million in cash and royalties on OpenAI technology.
Google and other AI giants have faced intense criticism for using copyrighted content to train AI chatbots without proper credit or permission, and then using those same chatbots to compete with publishers for traffic.
Thompson said big tech companies’ control over the flow of information “undermines creative potential and actually contributes to the proliferation of sleazy, third-rate clickbait”.
“Our problem is already two-fold: pirate sites, or worse, parasitic sites, are already repurposing our content and then mass-compositing our work without attribution, with serious consequences,” he added. “From an intellectual property perspective, this is criminal composition, and malicious snippets are the cruellest cut.”
More recently, Google took the controversial step of adding AI-generated summaries to search results while demoting links to other media outlets, a move that could be a death blow to the news industry, as The Washington Post reports.
Thomson said that while Google CEO Sundar Pichai has recently demonstrated a “commendable and concrete commitment to news,” the company’s dominance of the online search market has had a disruptive effect on publishers in the long term.
“We know two things: how important Google is, and how unfair, inequitable and blatantly biased Google search is,” Thompson said. “Our scoops are being stolen by content counterfeiters, who then rank higher. And there is political bias built into the search parameters.”
In drafting the deal with Open AI, News Corp’s legal team sought assurances “to provide guardrails to protect our content, provide clear source links and prevent the predation that is already commonplace,” Thomson added.
Other publishers have chosen to sue AI companies to protect their work: Last December, The New York Times filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI.
Thomson noted that such litigation is risky and could take years to reach a conclusion, with companies potentially suffering significant financial losses while the legal battle continues.
“If the New York Times loses, and I fear for their long-term prospects, they will have completely changed the definition of ‘fair use’ for all publishers, to their detriment,” Thompson said.
At the same time, the News Corp president did not rule out the possibility of taking legal action against other AI companies if talks on fair compensation fail.
Thomson said the company was “working with European publishers and various other people that I can’t identify, and certainly has several people under legal scrutiny.”
“We prefer to persuade rather than litigate because lawyers are the big winners in litigation,” he added, “but I would warn you: if we can’t persuade you, we may sue you.”
