The Seattle Times - The value of journalism must be established in the AI era

CJL director Dr. Courtny Radsch wrote an opinion piece that lays out the problems and solutions of Big Tech’s latest AI technology being built to inherently exploit the intellectual property of journalists resulting in writer’s unemployment, revenue loss, and more.

Big Tech is building its latest technology on the intellectual property and
uncompensated use of expression, content and data collected online and in databases.

Journalistic content, which is far more than just a collection of facts and is often gathered at great costs to the journalists who report the news, is indispensable to these new AI technologies.

The journalism sector needs a more sophisticated framework to determine the value of its content and what fair compensation would look like throughout various parts of the AI value chain.

The legal regulatory system has lagged recent rapid-fire developments in AI. By failing to enforce intellectual property rights, regulators have allowed a handful of companies to further entrench their dominance and develop technologies and business models that undermine the viability of entire sectors of the economy, including journalism.

The solution: News publishers, along with creative industries more broadly, must actively define the worth of their content and data by understanding how and why value is created throughout the generative AI process, from developing foundation models to powering real-time search, if they want to obtain fair compensation.

Journalism cannot be expected to adapt its business models to the AI era without interventions by policymakers to correct market imbalances, enforce
intellectual property rights, and require data access and transparency of AI systems.

After decades of giving away their content for free and being held hostage to the power of social media and search platforms, news publishers are realizing that they need to be more proactive in the era of AI.

As AI companies rely on news content to train their large language models and make AI applications more relevant, publishers already contending with a precipitous decline in referral traffic and the continued monopolization of digital advertising by Big Tech are being exploited even further.

The journalism industry shed nearly 3,000 jobs in the U.S. alone and scores of publications closed over the past year, exposing the unviability of business models that supported news providers well into the 21st century. Publishers have seen referral traffic, already in decline since Facebook de-prioritized news, plummet even as they are trying to navigate the demise of cookies and implications of AI for the future of their business.

Read full article here.