Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson has said the publisher “would do a deal” with an AI company “but only on the right terms”.
Bateson made the comments on Tuesday while appearing alongside four other news executives at the Deloitte and Enders Media and Telecoms conference in London.
At the same conference last year Bateson joined colleagues from Le Monde, The Telegraph and the Financial Times in calling for publishers to “get control” of their intellectual property from generative AI companies.
One year on, two of those other news businesses — Le Monde and the FT — have each made deals with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Asked whether The Guardian would do the same, Bateson said: “Would we do a deal? Yes — but only on the right terms and for the right value. And I think that’s easy to say and it’s very hard to actually deliver.
“Without in any way wanting to diminish or underestimate the potential opportunity and power of the technology [AI] — the technology businesses do seem to sort of believe that they’re exceptional, in a way, and that they don’t necessarily have to pay for the things that everyone else respects…
“They’re happy to pay for talent and they’re happy to pay for computing power, but then they don’t want to pay for data.
“I’m sure we’d all love to say: ‘We’re going to reduce our cost to our businesses by not paying for the things that are fundamental to the way that we run our businesses.’ We’d love not to have to pay for web hosting, we’d love not to have to pay for print or paper. But that’s not the way that markets work.”
Because of that, she said, “a respect for copyright” would have to “underpin any deal”.
The FT’s Matthew Garrahan, moderating the panel, asked whether deals being struck between publishers and AI businesses meant “history is repeating itself”, drawing a parallel to partnerships struck years earlier between news companies and social media platforms.
Bateson said: “I think everyone has a greater understanding about the importance of really standing up for and arguing the very real value, and I think everyone is more realistic about what the value exchange really is.
“The first value exchange was this idea that you could give away your content in return for this incredibly valuable audience and you would then be able to realise a return on that. I don’t think anyone believes that anymore.
“So therefore the robustness and the rigour with which the partnerships get negotiated is going to be very important to make sure that that value exchange is fair.”
New Telegraph chief executive ‘optimistic’ that copyright law leans in media’s favour on AI payments
Anna Jones, who became chief executive of Telegraph Media Group in January, said she felt “pretty hopeful” about AI and journalism.
“I think there are some established rules in other sectors that we can look to,” she said.
“I was actually on the board of Universal Music for a few years, and the music sector has already been through this — and has sort of proven that, actually, the IP of the creators who created the music, or in our case the news content, has to be rewarded for it, has to be paid for it…
“If you look at what happened with Universal and Tiktok, they’re just a little bit ahead of us. So if I look at it through that lens, I actually feel optimistic.
“And I also feel optimistic about the fact that they have to do deals with us. Because if you think about what people will be looking for… what will people be using their ChatGPT for — they’re asking it questions about what’s happening today, what’s culturally relevant, what’s happening in the election…
“And who is actually producing that? Well, the people who work with us.”
DMG Media chief executive Rich Caccappolo, however, said he feared “that whatever payment comes about is not going be enough to save the industry, or many of the participants in the industry”.
Specifically, he said he was concerned that generative AI replacing traditional search engines is “going to be devastating for some publishers who are very dependent on search…
“We’re very fortunate that people come to us direct to the homepage or they open up the app… but the sites that are dependent on search are going to be destroyed.”
Caccappolo said it is “very difficult, now, to build direct traffic. It’s probably more expensive than ever, probably harder than ever to get a new reader. And to get a new reader who becomes addicted, who comes back every day”.
He said community, whether in the form of comments or direct interactions with journalists, was one way to bring back direct audiences.
[Read more: Hard paywalls are ‘dangerous’ says Mail CEO Rich Caccappolo]
The Telegraph’s Jones suggested a different way of building those audiences back up, saying: “I think we will also have to go back to good old-fashioned brand campaigns — I think it’s something that the media did more of in the past and then there has just been a huge reliance for many years on Google.”
To that end Axios reported on Monday that The Wall Street Journal has launched a “multimillion-dollar brand advertising campaign” with a goal of “broadening the Journal’s subscriber appeal to a wider set of business professionals”.
Speaking the same day that ITN announced a deal that hopes to authenticate its content against AI fabrications, its chief executive Rachel Corp told the audience she remained concerned about the effects of both AI-generated deepfakes and more lo-fi “shallowfakes” on the election.
She said: “Broadcasters have to stop doing TV news when the polls open. All we can do is leaders voting and Labradors looking sad outside polling stations.
“We can’t take it on, so if something emerges of Rishi high-fiving Putin and that’s spreading, we can’t counter it in the normal way we would on our bulletins.”
She did add, however: “We’ll see — so far there hasn’t been very much.”
In February ITN issued a warning over deepfakes after fake videos posted online appeared to show its journalists endorsing or promoting products.
Dominic Carter on The Sun’s election endorsement: ‘Who knows?’
Also appearing on the panel on Tuesday was The Sun’s executive vice president and publisher, Dominic Carter, who told the crowd he wanted regulatory action on AI from the next government.
“It comes back to regulation,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what colour the next government… it’s really important for any government to take on copyright and IP.” (Guardian chief executive Bateson agreed, suggesting there may be a need for regulatorily-mandated labelling of synthetic content.)
Carter added that while the public may not think a great deal about the effects of AI on the quality of information now, “ultimately, people will care — and in a world of rising synethtic content they’ll care more”.
The News UK executive also disclosed that the election “doesn’t sell copies of the [Sun] newspaper, but it does drive traffic online”.
He said: “There are bits of it that our readers are fundamentally interested in, but it’s not at the exciting stage yet. It’s getting close — I think it’s a couple of weeks away.”
Asked by Garrahan whether The Sun could be expected to announce a dramatic switch in its support from the Tories, Carter said: “Who knows? We’ve got some time.”
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