Who owns the future?
That question probably has been with us as long as there’s been an us. Or at least from a time when people began to develop ideas and tools that created material wealth — and some accrued more than others.
A modern version of that question materialized with the digital explosion, whose starting point, for our purposes, was when the price of computing dropped to a level at which people began asking that incredibly short-lived question, why would anyone need a computer at home?
In the news business, the adoption of digital technology offered new capabilities and opportunities — and savings, as typesetting and paste-up jobs disappeared. A heady time for newspaper publishers, until creation of the world wide web — which slowly, and then suddenly, altered the information landscape. New technology-driven financial empires sprouted up, while traditional sources of news and information watched their business models rapidly dissolve.
That dislocation has been unrelenting, as publishers guessed wrong and wrong again about the shape of the threat and any possible response. Publishers owned the future, until they didn’t.
Now, some 30 years after the arrival of the first modern web browser, the widespread availability of artificial intelligence services — slowly, and then suddenly — poses the question yet again. The press of a different future, the question of ownership, is being felt keenly in any information business: data, news, entertainment, art. AI will create wealth, but how will that wealth be distributed?
In May, Google announced that its AI-generated summaries, AI Overview, which compiles content from news sites and blogs on a topic being searched, would be made available to everyone in the United States.
And now, publishing executives are worried that the paragraphs will sharply reduce the amount of traffic to their sites from Google, says The New York Times.
Media executives say they want their sites listed in Google’s search results, which for some outlets can generate more than half their traffic. But that means Google can use their content in AI Overview summaries.
The AI Overviews combine statements generated from AI models with pieces of content from live links across the web, says the Times. The summaries often contain excerpts from multiple websites while citing sources — giving comprehensive answers without the user ever having to click to another page.
The News/Media Alliance, a trade group of 2,000 newspapers, has sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission urging those agencies to investigate Google’s “misappropriation” of news content and stop the company from rolling out AI Overview.
In 1812, the Luddites faced their own technology day of reckoning. Brian Merchant, in his book “Blood in the Machine,” writes: “But if you raise concerns about any of this, you’re apt to be labeled anti-technology, or anti-progress. You’re apt to be called a Luddite. Today, the term is used as an epithet for someone who hates or doesn’t understand new technology—but that couldn’t be any further from the historical truth. The Luddites understood technology all too well; they didn’t hate it, but rather the way it was used against them. And as we’ll soon see, the technologies that people are ridiculed for protesting tend to be the ones designed to profit at the protester’s expense.”
More on AI in journalism:
Hoodline, a company that runs hyperlocal news sites for cities across the country, leans heavily on AI-generated content, by AI-invented reporters.
A report by the Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism School examines the impact of AI on the news business.