Locally Sourced Chum

Recently, on the website of USA Today, I asked a generative AI chatbot called DeeperDive a question: “Is AI good?” DeeperDive, which was unveiled in June, is a product of a company called Taboola, one of the largest native advertising platforms on the internet, with some nine thousand publishing partners. USA Today’s corporate parent—formerly known as Gannett, which recently rebranded as USA Today Co.—runs America’s biggest newspaper chain, and has been in business with Taboola since 2013, amassing user data, selling ads, and suggesting “content you may like.” With the DeeperDive announcement, USA Today set out to “tap into AI-driven automation,” Trisha Gosser, the company’s chief financial officer, said on an earnings call over the summer: the chatbot’s “answer engine” would be housed directly on USA Today and the other sites under its umbrella, drawing from their newsrooms’ material. Michael Reed, the chairman and chief executive, said that DeeperDive represented “an exciting win” and that USA Today was “thrilled to be the first to roll out this technology” in the United States.

The release of DeeperDive was an acknowledgment of fundamental tensions between the rise of artificial intelligence and the delivery of news, since the futures of both USA Today and Taboola will be shaped by generative AI agents that scrape and reassemble information in response to users’ queries. As Adam Singolda, the CEO and founder of Taboola, put it, “It’s time to build a future where AI helps drive the open Web, not drain it, by generating meaningful traffic, sharing value, and respecting the creators who make the internet worth exploring.”