News Corp boss wants AI companies to pay for news like Facebook and Google do

News Corp’s Australian boss has called for artificial intelligence (AI) companies to pay for the news content used to train their products while invoking how Australia successfully muscled Meta (Facebook) and Google into signing lucrative publisher deals. 

In an opinion piece published in The Australian on Sunday, News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller talked up the utility of AI for journalists before taking aim at OpenAI and other AI companies for building their products off the back of journalism.

“OpenAI has, for example, quickly established a business worth $US30bn ($44bn) by using the others’ original content and creativity without remuneration and attribution,” he wrote.

Generative AI products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained on corpuses of data so that a model can learn how to answer prompts. These training sets typically involve huge amounts of information scraped from the internet, including content produced by news publishers. 

Miller drew a comparison with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Google, who were both cajoled into signing deals with Australian publishers to licence their content for use.

“Befittingly, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry and introduction of the federal government’s News Media Bargaining Code, has recently led to collaborative partnerships with the tech giants that recognise the value of journalism,” he said.

The News Corp chief argued that AI companies should enter into similar agreements with news publishers.  

“Similarly, creators deserve to be rewarded for their original work being used by AI engines which are raiding the style and tone of not only journalists but (to name a few) musicians, authors, poets, historians, painters, filmmakers and photographers. It is feasting on their creativity.”

Australia’s news media bargaining code paved the way for deals reportedly worth $200 million for local publishers (including Crikey’s owner Private Media). The legislation, passed by the Morrison government, threatened tech companies with “designation”, which would mean forced arbitration for their use of Australian publisher’s news content on their platforms. No platform has yet been designated but the spectre was enough to encourage deals with most major publishers (although many minor publishers have not been able to come to agreements). A review late last year found the legislation had mostly been a success.

Miller’s article echoed — and at times quoted — News Corp’s global chief executive officer Robert Thomson who spoke last month about the company’s discussions with an unnamed AI company about financial compensation. Miller previously had urged staff to experiment with ChatGPT and tasked an internal working group with exploring how the technology could be used within the company. 

Other major US publishers are already discussing how to press AI companies for deals for using their work as they consider how tools like ChatGPT will cut into their existing models built around monetising traffic from search. Other publishers are taking steps to oppose inclusion. Late last year The Chaser put up new restrictions to stop their content being used to train AI.