CJL Director Dr. Courtney Radsch extends the conversation on journalism and AI discussing generative artificial intelligence deriving responses from journalistic news sources and the unfairness of these practices.

What answer does ChatGPT, the program that can generate text or answer questions based on prompts, give when you ask it why journalism is so often used to train generative artificial intelligence?

ChatGPT will tell you that the news is factual, includes language variation and cultural awareness, comprises complex sentence structures, includes quotes that convey real-world conversations, excels at summarization and condensation, and can help a model improve information retrieval. In fact, the news is so valuable to this endeavor that it makes up half of the top 10 sites incorporated into one of Google’s datasets that is being used to train some of the most popular large language models, according to a recent analysis. That includes content that was put behind paywalls with the intention of being restricted to paid users. 

This is the issue at the heart of recent lawsuits filed by The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, Getty, and AlterNet against OpenAI, Microsoft, Stability AI, and others for using vast troves of their articles and images to train ChatGPT and other generative AI products and services. OpenAI and the other companies building the new generation of AI tools did not ask permission to use these stories and aren’t compensating the news organizations for their work but instead are arguing that their actions are covered by the fair use doctrine. But as we watch the fight between news organizations and Big Tech and the rules around AI unfold, we should be looking to policymakers to set the rules and ensure a level playing field so that journalism survives and thrives in the transition to AI. This is not only an imperative for the embattled news industry but also for democracy more broadly.

Indeed, journalism is still reeling from the social media age when Google and Facebook, now Meta, exploited their dominance and starved news outlets of digital advertising revenues. At a Senate hearing on AI and the future of journalism in January lawmakers and experts were aligned on their criticism of Big Tech’s role in imperiling local news. “It is literally eating away at the lifeblood of our democracy,” warned Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, who chaired the bipartisan hearing. 

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