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How Publicist Media Fights Against Big Tech’s AI Services

But some journalists are undermining the work and acts as PR Agents for GenAI

Tech companies selling chatbot services have started hiring journalists. Their working hours and location are flexible, the pay is good and the tasks are endless. No one else has to read their texts because they have to train a chatbot based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) and try and make it ‘hallucinate’ less – i.e. lie less. Chatbots are probability machines that guess every single next word in a sentence.

“It’s like being paid to write in sand. Even if our words could make a difference, we’d never be able to recognize them,” writes Jack Apollo George in The Guardian under the headline: “If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high on fumes.”

AI services like ChatGPT are running out of words. They’ve vacuumed the internet and are struggling to get hold of up-to-date content. Although the bots produce many words themselves, the words are synthetic and cannot be used because of the risk of model collapse, a kind of degenerative process. Therefore, they hunger for man-made factually correct content.

In Denmark, we haven’t heard about the new job opportunities for journalists. However, many journalists are so excited about the new tools that they are constantly promoting them on social media. They also make money themselves by getting other journalists to use them through courses and training instead of limiting their use and waiting for legal and ethical alternatives that are on the way. The current services from the US are accused of violating media copyrights, overusing the planet’s resources, manipulating, lying, and much more.

Slow down, understand the new tools but wait to deploy them more broadly when there are legal and ethical alternatives that are on the way.

Fortunately, media executives are fighting back. The industry organization Danske Medier and the media’s joint negotiating body, DPCMO, have informed Google that they cannot launch their new service ‘Google AI Overview’ in Denmark. It does not provide search results with links that send people to the original source, but is in itself a small article, which can mean that people never get to the media websites (= revenue). The two organisations have communicated the same to OpenAI, which Microsoft owns a big part of. They are behind ChatGPT and are testing SearchGPT, which like Google’s AI Overview allegedly also uses Danish media content without permission.

Danish media thus acts proactively, and what makes them unique compared to other countries is that they represent 99% of the media industry. The big ones stand together with the small ones. In other countries, some media houses give in on the tech giants’ tactic of entering into short-term license agreements so they can legally use their content. The giants are betting that other media will follow suit and end up paying only a few bucks for their content.

The big ones stand together with the small ones

“Google and OpenAI say they respect the choices of content creators and owners, but in practice that’s not what we see. That’s why we need to take this step and at the same time prepare legal and political steps,” explains Karen Rønde, lawyer and CEO of DPCMO.

Danish media have learned something since they gave their content to Google and Facebook, which today get the lion’s share of advertising revenue. They have also blocked their content from being used by AI services, following in the footsteps of The New York Times, which has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The battle is fierce. It costs resources for the media, and it’s uphill because we are talking about powerful companies. But the fight is necessary if independent journalism is to survive in the long term. New technology is only just beginning to take away media jobs. Therefore, journalists and others who value journalism should back up and think twice before uncritically praising the current services and turning down a job offer like the one at The Guardian, where they are helping to saw off even more of the branch they are sitting on.

Translated with the help of deepl.com

This was first published in Danish in the daily Politiken

PS With this column I am arguing against big tech sitting on and controlling AI. With the new ethical and legal language models that the EU and European countries work on, I believe the media should feed them with their content, as long as they plan to be open source and non-profit.