Report: Publishers Considering Coalition to Combat AI Use of Content

News and magazine publishers are reportedly looking to protect their business from artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

Several publishers are considering banding together to address the matter, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Wednesday (June 28), citing unnamed sources.

One of the publishers is the WSJ’s parent company, News Corp., according to the report.

Among the publishers’ concerns is how their content, including both text and images, has been used to “train” AI tools and whether they should be compensated, the report said.

Another concern is that generative AI tools provide information to users without requiring them to click on links to go directly to the source, per the report.

They are also concerned that their content will be combined with that of other publishers and presented by the AI tool to the user, without acknowledgement of the origins of the content, the report said.

It was reported in April that Twitter owner Elon Musk has threatened to sue Microsoft over “illegal” use of the platform’s data after reporting that Microsoft’s advertising platform would stop supporting Twitter due to the social media company’s requirement for payment for application programming interface (API) access.

“They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time,” Musk said in a tweet.

A report by The Verge noted that Musk’s oblique threat was apparently connected to Microsoft-backed OpenAI using data from Twitter to train its ChatGPT generative AI tool.

As PYMNTS reported April 11, the ways in which businesses gather, collect and use data to power their AI solutions should be the central focus of any regulatory frameworks.

By enacting guardrails around the provenance of data used in large language models (LLMs) and other training models, making it obvious when an AI model is generating synthetic content, including text, images and even voice applications and flagging its source, governments and regulators can protect consumer privacy without hampering private sector innovation and growth.

Publishers have also clashed with big tech companies over issues other than AI.

For example, in May, Meta said it will remove news from Facebook and Instagram if it is forced to pay for it by a California bill.

The proposed legislation, the Journalism Preservation Act, would require online platforms to pay a “journalism usage fee” to news providers whose content appears on their platforms and is used to sell advertising.