AI chatbots should pay for news, bipartisan Senate group says

Senators who have raised bipartisan outcry over the demise of newsrooms at the hands of Big Tech companies are rallying to protect journalism from the potentially fatal blow of artificial intelligence.

They’re hoping to ensure that news organizations receive full compensation when algorithms are trained using news articles — and are urging colleagues to act before the twilight of human-generated news sets in.

“There are legitimate fears that AI will directly replace journalists,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Privacy, Technology and the Law Subcommittee, said at a hearing last month. Blumenthal urged senators not to repeat a prior mistake by being too slow to regulate technology’s impact on the industry.

“Our purpose here must be to determine how we can ensure that reporters and readers reap the benefits of AI and avoid the pitfalls,” he said.

The danger of AI arrives amid findings by Northwestern University that one-third of local newspapers in the U.S. have folded since 2005. And it’s been a brutal start to the year for the industry, with layoffs of more than 500 journalists in January, including at major publications.

AI is already a reality in newsrooms across the country. Journalists use it to generate transcripts during interviews, analyze large troves of leaked documents.

But the advent of generative AI, the technology behind ChatGPT and OpenAI that creates new content, is seen as a direct threat to journalists’ jobs despite misgivings over the quality and accuracy of the content. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over this very issue — asking a federal judge in Manhattan to block the companies from using its stories to train chatbots.

“Adding insult to injury, those models are then used to compete with newspapers and broadcast, cannibalizing readership and revenue from the journalistic institutions that generate the content in the first place,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in September issued a legislative outline that would create license requirements to guarantee that “newspapers and broadcasters are given credit financially and publicly for reporting and other content” used by AI companies, Blumenthal said.

Hawley stressed that Congress has a role to play in making sure newsrooms can protect their content from being scraped off their websites and then regurgitated, for free, by AI chatbots.

“That includes hoovering up content they didn’t pay for and using it to make their own platforms more powerful. Frankly, the big AI companies should be paying for whatever personal data they’re using to train their models, rather than swiping it now and asking questions later,” Hawley said in a statement.