Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Why Aren’t Newsrooms Covering This AI Speech?

A.G. Sulzberger urges the media to unite and fight back.

The publisher of The New York Times recently made an extraordinary speech about AI, journalism, and the public square that’s received surprisingly little public reaction. What makes A.G. Sulzberger’s speech extraordinary is that it was unabashedly crusading, and crusading is a stance New York Times publishers have rarely if ever adopted over the newspaper’s 175-year history. What makes the scant reaction surprising is that the speech’s audience—fellow leaders of some of the world’s most powerful news organizations—have a commercial self-interest in the crusade Sulzberger is advocating for. What’s more, the accusations Sulzberger made, the plainspoken language he used, the alleged villains he called out by name—Google, Meta, OpenAI—are the stuff of high drama.

Sulzberger’s core argument when addressing the annual WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference on June 1 was that Big Tech is stealing the news media’s property and undermining democracy, and that the only solution is for news organizations to work together to resist them.

Big Tech’s “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,” Sulzberger argued. “Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work.”

If such stealing is allowed to continue, he continued, we risk a “future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy—the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism—continues to dry up…. The news industry’s only path to counteracting [Big Tech’s machinations]…is by working together” to protect the industry’s property rights, including through lawsuits. (The Times, he noted, has spent $20 million on such........

© The Nation