How to Think About All That Funding from Open AI

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces. We are publishing a day early this week because of travel tomorrow.

I have long tried to resist appeals to vet donors to nonprofit journalism for their politics or even the savoriness of their business practices. When you do that, I think, you raise questions about whether you could fairly cover any potential donors on your banned list, and also run the risk of offering some sort of implicit endorsement to the rest. Both of those perceptions are antithetical to the independent stance good journalism requires. So, to take one notorious example, we never received a check from the Koch interests when I was running the business side of ProPublica, but I would have been happy to take it if we had. Nor am I one of those people who think it makes sense to refuse corporate contributions. Almost all major donors derive the money they are offering you from a successful corporation.

With that said, I do this week want to offer some cautionary thoughts on the largess from the company that has become the leading corporate supporter of American journalism, Open AI. In gifts through their own “People First AI Fund,” and through large grants dispersed through the American Journalism Project and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism (both occasional consulting clients of mine), Open AI has now distributed $25 million in cash to US newsrooms in the last few years, a large multiple of the grants from Microsoft and Google. Open AI has also made a number of significant one-off gifts, so their total is considerably larger. Anthropic has not yet joined this party.

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I know the money is needed, and I am not questioning the uses to which it is currently being put. As I have tried to say here a number of times, I think newsrooms need to be more creative in the use of AI, not less, more innovative and less afraid of the implications for particular kinds of work that may be becoming outmoded.

Realities to remember

Here’s what I think the recipients need to bear in mind:

• The company’s motivation here is not altruistic. Open AI says its intent is “to benefit all of humanity,” but we know that some people there and elsewhere worry that it is, in fact, going to end up snuffing out humanity. We also see that, in the face of such warnings, the company races along, with its CEO announcing that “the world should accept some bad things happening.” More narrowly, the firm’s spending on supporting news is almost certainly seen internally as a form of marketing and public relations, helping to spur product adoption and perhaps blunt any impulses toward regulation or taxation, both of which seem to me critically and urgently necessary.
• The money may be material to us, but it isn’t to them. It should be sobering, for instance, that Open AI spent roughly the same amount of money trying to intervene in a single Manhattan congressional primary this past spring as it has given out to newsrooms over years through Lenfest.
• Our worldviews are at fundamental variance. The core principles of journalism focus on the search for accuracy with fairness, and the discovery of truth. The essence of the business of generative artificial intelligence seems to be the maximization of profit, whether or not those other goals are achieved.
• The spigot could shut off at any time, and likely eventually will. We have been down this road before with tech firms, and need to assume this funding won’t be sustained, and shouldn’t be part of any plan for sustainability. Facebook was a significant funder of news until it not only wasn’t, but then took steps to choke off the flow of news altogether to its users. Google purported to be especially solicitous of news until, in my view, it detected insufficient gratitude and greater support for regulation (especially in Canada), and largely reversed course.

 

• Inside the velvet glove is a mailed fist. We should never forget that there is significant evidence that Open AI has built its enormous machine in small but significant (at least to us) part by appropriating our intellectual property without compensation. That’s a nice way of saying that they are arguing in court that they have the right to take our lifeblood while laying waste to important parts of our business. This is ultimately a legal question, but one in which the company—and, to be sure, its competitors at Anthropic, Google, Meta and Microsoft—are our adversaries. The stakes in those fights may be existential for newsrooms; they will not be for the platforms.
• Transparency is always a good idea. When creating new AI tools or devising new methods or products using AI that are ultimately funded by an AI company, you owe it to your readers, listeners or viewers to let them know about that funding. Don’t limit the disclosure to an intermediary source through which the money passed.
• Innovation needs to be coupled with accountability. Even as Open AI and, to a lesser extent, some of its competitors, are paying us for more rapid and clever adoption of their products and services, it’s very important that anyone taking this funding also invest commensurately in increased accountability for these behemoths and the havoc they are wreaking in some local communities, many funding streams and, moving forward, job markets. I do have faith in the ability of editors and publishers to maintain editorial independence from funders; I have seen it in action many times. But the larger the portions of food on offer, the greater the temptation not to bite the hand offering it. We need to help each other to resist this, including by pointing out compromises among colleagues if and when we see them.

One important caveat: I am far less concerned about the explosion almost certainly ahead in individual philanthropy derived from AI than I am about the direct provision of corporate funds. There may be issues with some individuals, of course. But the multiplicity of likely funders will help, as will their varying motivations.

A final thought

The hard truth is that corporate philanthropy has always been something of an oxymoron. The duty of corporations is to their shareholders, and specifically to the maximizing of shareholder value. In companies with more enlightened management, we can take some comfort that this objective is sought over the long run, which may more closely align with societal interests. Managers with more limited vision, as well as those so enamored of their own capabilities as to conflate society’s objectives with their own, present a less happy case. All of us would do well to look hard at which of these types we believe are leading the AI revolution today.

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