Behind the Times, yes, but A.G. Sulzberger isn’t frightened of being portrayed as “another ossified institution lashing out at innovators driving the forward march of progress”.
Speaking at WAN-Ifra’s World News Media Congress in Marseille, the New York Times chairman and publisher warned that AI companies – “already among the richest and most powerful in human history” – were carving out an increasingly central role in the public information ecosystem, while failing to embrace a core responsibility to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information.
“Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products – a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale,“ he said
“Meanwhile, the AI wave itself may be bigger and faster as the technology continues to improve. Even if things are feeling fine now, remember that these early swells herald an approaching tsunami.”
Delivering the opening keynote, Sulzberger (pictured) was scathing of how AI companies were “strip-mining” publishers’ sites and value.
He said colleagues at the Times – which “has a long record of embracing technology to advance the mission of independent journalism” – were using AI technology responsibly, ethically, and with humans making the decisions.
“Holding a powerful new technology at arms length is a recipe for failure,” he said.
Publishers were not “leaving their toys out on the lawn”. The theft was happening when they are locked up safely in the house, a study having found that about 30 per cent of AI bot scrapes violated explicit restrictions on accessing and taking websites’ content, including content protected behind paywalls.
Sulzberger said the New York Times was the main source of proprietary data in a dataset that was used to train various LLMs, followed by other publishers such as The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times.
He said taking OpenAI and its partner Microsoft to court “for brazen violations of our intellectual property rights protected by US copyright law” was slow and expensive, stretching two-and-a-half years and costing more than US$20 million.
“As AI companies are doubtlessly aware, most news organisations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights,” he said.
He advised publishers to stand up for their rights, deal carefully, and push legislators for strong IP protections, limits to unauthorised bot scraping, and requirements for AI platforms to reveal how they use news publishers’ work.
And he urged publishers use AI the right way, arguing that there was “nothing inherently bad about the technology, which can bring real value to organisations that find the right ways to embrace it”.
He also argued for a focus on original reporting – to be a destination in an online sphere intermediated by AI, “you’ll need journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity” – and explain why journalism matters.
“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution,” Sulzberger said.
“We cannot allow AI cheerleaders to dominate the public conversation without interjecting to argue for the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for original journalism. We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create.”
“We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.”
WAN-Ifra/Teemu Henriksson, with thanks