Avengers: Age of ChatGPT

If the threat of AI was a Marvel villain, it’d have to be Ultron. Which would make the news organizations currently considering forming a coalition to deal with AI… The Avengers?

According to a report published yesterday, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal parent company News Corp, Vox Media, and other publications are in talks to partner up, a tough thing for competitors (and Avengers) to do. But when the threat is great enough – in this case, existential risk of not just the news industry, but the planet – the Avengers must assemble.

Topping the list of the publishers’ concerns:

• Content scraping: The AI models are trained on articles and images published by these news organizations, which, according to some executives, is a breach of intellectual property.
• Leapfrogging the news: AI-search engines deliver news information directly to the user, bypassing the need to visit the original publication’s website. The publishers argue they should be paid for access to this content.

📰🤖 Zoom out: News publishers aren’t the only ones feeling the impact of AI-generated content. Earlier this week, Amazon Kindle’s bestsellers list in the young adult romance category was filled with nonsensical AI-generated content, including such “classics” as when the three attacks and Apricot bar code architecture.