Last week the News/Media Alliance commended the Bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Task Force on their leadership and thorough work in publishing their report that examines the issues surrounding the rapid growth and implementation of artificial intelligence. At the same time, the contents of their report demonstrate how much more work Congress has to do to confront these issues.
News/Media Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey stated: “In this critical time when artificial intelligence is being deployed at breakneck speed, leaders need to think about its effects on critical industries before it’s too late. News and content creators rely on copyright to protect their labor and investment, and enable them to continue producing quality content for the American people. But as the Task Force recognizes, that quality content is being scraped by AI companies developing large language models. While many publishers have clearly stated that their content should not be scraped without their permission and authorization, the Task Force pointedly found that ‘Unfortunately, these clearly stated requests are often ignored,’ resulting in disputes and litigation.”
The News/Media Alliance has published a study that demonstrated how many large language models retain and often reproduce whole passages of copyrighted news articles. When AI companies can reproduce the work of publishers to provide users the information that they are seeking, without compensating publishers, The News/Media Alliance says this irreparably damages publishers’ businesses, which depend on relationships with their readers, web traffic, and the trustworthiness of brands built over decades.
Coffey continued, “This status quo is broken – the law needs to catch up to the technological developments of the last several years. Both content creators and AI companies need a clear set of rules to operate by, and users need to know what information they can trust. For publishers and other creators to be able to protect their rights under existing law, it is essential that AI companies be required to transparently disclose the content they take and use to train and deploy their models. The Task Force noted that transparency requirements ‘would potentially allow creators to see whether their copyrighted content was included in the training corpus of an AI model to identify infringement,’ and ‘could allow users of the AI system to assess and understand outputs.’
"It is now incumbent upon the next Congress to take the vital next steps, and pass legislation to require transparency into AI models, protect the investments of publishers into quality reporting, and ensure a stable future for American journalism in the age of AI.”
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