Short-Sighted AI Deals Aren’t The Future Of Journalism

It’s another chilling week for AI and journalism, with California lawmakers rolling over to Google by tacking money for AI onto a bill that attempts to stop the tech giant from hoovering up newsrooms’ money, and Conde Nast being the latest publisher to get in bed with OpenAI. The dealmakers here call this realism and opportunity, while anyone who actually cares about journalism knows it’s anything but.

Today’s California deal earmarks $250 million for newsrooms, with $180 million being distributed among outlets, and $70 million going to a “National AI Accelerator.” AI was not part of the original proposal by Oakland Assemblymember Buffy Wicks; draft language in the new proposal, first reported by Politico, cited the need to “strengthen democracy and the future of work in an Artificial Intelligence future.” The deal is the culmination of conflict over the California Journalism Protection Act, which followed in the footsteps of bills in places like Canada and Australia that sought to make tech giants like Google and Facebook give back to the newsrooms from whom they siphon money.

There’s a kind of grim fatalism around the agreement and the supposed “Artificial Intelligence future. ” Politico wrote that “Wicks sees the final agreement as the best way to get money into publishers’ hands quickly” and quotes Wicks as saying, “I think I’m dealing with the art of the possible… This represents, to me, the best case scenario for the moment we’re in. And I would rather take a nearly quarter of a billion dollar deal than nothing.” According to CalMatters, Julie Makinen, board chairperson of the California News Publishers Association, said that the plan is “not what we had hoped for when set out… Sometimes, the political realities, they are what they are.” 

Meanwhile, people who work in or care about journalism are taking a more aggressive stance, with Media Guild of the West President Matt Pearce calling it “a total rout.” In a statement, the Media Guild called the deal a “shakedown” and wrote that 

After two years of advocacy for strong antimonopoly action to start turning around the decline of local newsrooms, we are left almost without words. The publishers who claim to represent our industry are celebrating an opaque deal involving taxpayer funds, a vague AI accelerator project that could very well destroy journalism jobs, and minimal financial commitments from Google to return the wealth this monopoly has stolen from our newsrooms.

California tech journalist Brian Merchant wrote on Twitter that “This bill was supposed to make big tech pay its fair share after usurping advertising from news publishers and profiting from their work—instead it’s *rewarding* their market dominance by turning journos into content trainers for AI systems.” 

Let’s pivot for a moment: also this week, Conde Nast announced a deal with OpenAI, joining the likes of Vox and The Atlantic in helping the job-stealing, content-degrading machine steal their jobs and degrade their content. Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch wrote that the deal will 

expand the reach of Conde Nast’s content. As we all know, generative AI is rapidly changing ways audiences are discovering information. It’s crucial that we meet audiences where they are and embrace new technologies while also ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property. This is exactly what we have found with OpenAI.

How have these deals been going so far? Well, Nieman Lab reported in July that Business Insider, who signed a deal with OpenAI last year, found, in the words of union members who investigated, that “OpenAI may be downplaying rather than elevating our works… Repeated efforts by unit members have been unable to prompt ChatGPT to link directly to our scoops, even when explicitly instructed to do so.” ChatGPT was linking to aggregation of stories Business Insider broke, and, when prompted to link to the outlet that first broke those stories, provided made-up Business Insider URLs instead of actual links.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Nieman Lab (emphasis mine) that “Together with our news publisher partners, we’re building an experience that blends conversational capabilities with their latest news content, ensuring proper attribution and linking to source material — an enhanced experience still in development and not yet available in ChatGPT.”

To recap: one of the supposed points of getting into bed with OpenAI is so it will surface your work, except that needs to be added to the long list of things AI can’t do yet but which you should totally trust that it will eventually do, despite the fact that it is running out of the data, power, and money to do anything it promises to do at all. Given all that, what can these deals do? As Hell Gate owner Max Rivlin-Nadler wrote on Twitter, all this really amounts to is “bosses literally selling you out to make up for their own failings as executives in return for a short-term cash infusion that will certainly evaporate into their own bank accounts and leave you jobless.”

What we see in both the California agreement and the Conde Nast deal is just propping up the tiresome trope about AI’s inevitability, a desperate response to the cash-strapped present dressed up as future-planning. I can’t believe I have to keep screaming “Facebook Live! The metaverse! Crypto!” every time we do one of these, a repetitive exercise that might actually be the best use of AI at this point. These deals highlight the utter disregard the people calling the shots actually have for workers and readers, how few ideas they have for ensuring a future for journalism, if that’s even a motivating factor for them beyond their own salaries and valuations. 

I worry that in one or five or ten years, we’ll look back at this moment and regret these decisions–or, best case scenario, see them as nothing more than a bit of extra runway that led us back to the same bind we’re currently in, only with even fewer jobs and even hotter summers. I can’t say I have the answer–reminding you to please subscribe to Aftermath and our worker-owned peers is a tiny bandaid on a much bigger problem–but surely making the same short-sighted mistakes, dressed up as innovation just like every other time, isn’t the way to go.  

(Update 8/23/24: Brian Merchant wrote a blog post today going into more detail about the background of the California deal and how it was passed, which is fascinating, maddening reading.)