Senior reporter Karina Montoya explores the expanding intersection of antitrust issues and AI in journalism, shining a light on the need for local coverage on how AI hinders competition and harms labor rights.

In my Nieman Lab prediction for 2023, I expected to see a rise in antitrust news. It has indeed been a packed two years for reporters in this beat, often involving market regulation and consumer protection stories. Google faced three monopoly trials, with one of them poised to reshape ad revenues for news publishers. Similarly, Grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons — who are attempting to merge — faced off the Federal Trade Commission, and the states of Washington and Colorado, in three separate trials this year.

AI has also entered into the equation in a massive way. News first introduced us to AI tools as a shiny, new way of producing and using synthetic content. Shorty after, we learned the risks of this AI rollout to workers, especially in journalism and the creative industries, as well as for climate change and people’s safety. The reporting on real impacts of large-scale AI in society helped us pull away from distracting narratives of AI-driven dystopian and utopian worlds.

Although it may not be immediately clear, all these issues are pertinent to competition and antitrust. In the year ahead, as more journalists delve into AI risks and harms, I expect to see these issues converge under an antitrust lens. Since the Trump administration is likely to roll back executive orders on competition and AI regulation, my hope is that more journalists pivot their attention to state and local coverage of these issues.

There are already some clear examples of this convergence of AI and antitrust. In the litigation of Google’s search monopoly in D.C., the judge overseeing the case just decided that assessing the impact of AI in search will be part of the remedies trial next April. For journalists, this involves developing a deeper understanding of how foundation models are built, and how technology companies operating multiple lines of business can leverage existing data advantages to entrench their power in nascent markets.

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