The bosses of eight UK national newspapers ranging from The Guardian to The Sun have urged the Prime Minister to back legislation aimed at outlawing deceptive AI bots.
The Automated Online Software (Access and Transparency) Bill would require bots accessing UK websites to declare who operates them and how to contact them, and why they plan to use the content – for example for search indexing or AI training.
This would allow website owners to see who is taking their content, turn away those who won’t pay, and give AI companies who use publisher content an incentive to strike fair deals.
The proposed law is a Private Members’ Bill put forward in June by Conservative MP Damian Hinds working with the News Media Association. The bill was due to have its second reading in Parliament on Friday (16 October).
But the legislation has more chance of success if it is backed by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who could also introduce a similar bill of his own.
In a letter to Burnham, news and tech bosses said: “Much of the debate on AI fixates on distant, existential risks, but this harm is already here: unidentifiable bots are taking valuable content, imposing costs on businesses and weakening the market for trusted information.
“The continued creation of trusted information, including professional journalism, is critical to our epistemic security and our nation’s democratic infrastructure…
“The case for transparency is clear. What is missing is a decision to act.
Representing the UK national newspaper industry, the letter was signed by:
— Anna Bateson, CEO, Guardian Media Group
— Chris Evans, editor, The Daily Telegraph
— Chris Longcroft, EVP and publisher, The Times and The Sunday Times
— Danny Groom, CEO, Daily Mail
— Dominic Carter, EVP and publisher, The Sun
— Geoff Maynard, editor in chief, Daily and Sunday Express
— Jon Slade, CEO, Financial Times
— Neil McIntosh, editor, Daily Record
Conde Nast chief product and technology officer Vasanth Williams and Liverpool Echo editor-in-chief Steve Graves also signed the letter.
They were joined by Reddit chief operating officer Jen Wong and Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts.
The News Media Association said 19 out of the 20 biggest news websites in the UK can currently be scraped by commercially available stealth bot tools, despite paywalls and expensive bot-blocking
technology.
The letter said: “This makes it impossible to control access to information properly or to negotiate a fair price for it.
“Voluntary standards have failed. The only established means for a website to signal which bots may access it, the robots.txt protocol, carries no legal force and is being ignored on a mass scale.
“The Hinds Bill is a modest fix. It requires bots to identify who operates them and what they will do with the content they access. It does not regulate AI firms directly or dictate a bot’s behaviour. It simply gives website owners the information they need to identify and assess potentially abusive traffic, then take action to block it or negotiate fair payment terms for access.
“This is not only a problem for publishers. Businesses of every size pay the hosting bills for crawlers they cannot identify, only to have valuable data, including personal data, extracted without their knowledge. The high volumes of bot traffic many experience slow their websites down or even take them offline completely. This is harming UK businesses at a time when they can ill afford further setbacks.”
Ultimately under the bill, operators could register to be on a “white list” of good bots and online safety regulator Ofcom could publicly name and shame offenders by publishing compliance notices.
In addition website owners could sue those who continue to bypass the rules for an injunction or damages, and courts could order UK internet providers to block persistent offenders.
Similar legislation, the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act, has already progressed through the New York Senate and Assembly in New York and is now awaiting sign-off from the state governor.
A bipartisan bill, the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, is now also been introduced in the US Congress backed by trade organisation the News/Media Alliance, whose president and CEO Danielle Coffey described it as a “sorely-needed, common-sense solution to a problem plaguing news publishers and other industries across the internet.
“We are drowning in bot traffic that is hurting our ability to serve our readers, and existing technical tools simply aren’t enough to protect our content from malicious actors that can disguise their identity.
“We need transparency and accountability for bad actors, as well as enforcement mechanisms that require the most basic transparency disclosure.”
That bill was supported by news leaders including News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch, Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella and Tampa Bay Times CEO Conan Gallaty.
Thomson said: “Stealth bots are the silent scavengers of the internet – phantom parasites that loot legitimate sites and pillage intellectual property. By unmasking these bad boy bots, this legislation performs a vital role in protecting creators and journalists, and safeguarding internet integrity.”
Lynch added: “AI companies are using disguised bots to scrape and steal original journalism with zero accountability. They use our work to train and operate their systems that then directly compete with us.”
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