Congress: Maybe We Shouldn't Let AI Destroy the News Media

Last year, after Buzzfeed laid off its entire newsroom and made a pronounced pivot to AI generated content, that journalists should treat the technology as an existential threat. It seemed clear that companies like OpenAI were creating content generating algorithms that could be used to compete with traditional (read: human) reporters.

I added the qualification that I might, potentially, be indulging in alarmism. It was early days and, just because it seemed like AI could prove a big problem for the news industry, that didn’t mean that things would necessarily pan out that way. Since then, however, nothing has particularly happened to soften my stance.

More and more, it seems like the journalism industry is under threat from a technology that is intent on using content created by humans to replace them. Thankfully, it seems like Congress is finally on the same page. This week, the US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing dubbed “ .” It was chaired by Sen.

Richard Blumenthal (D Connecticut), and gave representatives from media companies the opportunity to speak about the potential harms that AI was doing to their industry. Blumenthal described AI as an “existential crisis” for the news media and spoke of the need to swiftly address the harms AI could cause: “We need to move more quickly than we did on social media and learn from our mistakes in the delay there,” he said.

Wednesday’s speakers included Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, who gave one of the better defenses of the role that actual, non AI humans should play in the journalism industry. Lynch said: At the end of the day, the committee largely seemed amenable to passing laws that would force AI companies to license content that they use to train their algorithms.

This would force those companies to enter into bartering arrangements with media companies, instead of simply stealing the material. The New York Times , accusing the company of violating copyright law by using its material to train GPT 4, the LLM that powers the company’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT.

Legal experts contend that the Times’ lawsuit is one of the strongest attacks yet on the AI industry’s “fair use” doctrine when it comes to algorithm training material. In response to the Times’ lawsuit, OpenAI , referring to it as “without merit.” The truth is that the news media already had a strained and not altogether healthy relationship with the tech industry before AI came along.

Over the past two decades, tech companies have sucked up that formerly went to news organizations. This trend has drastically reshaped the media economy and helped to what was once a vibrant and diverse news industry. In recent times, some governments have attempted to level the playing field by between tech companies and the media.

Companies like Facebook, obviously aware of how much money they’d be losing by acquiescing to those agreements, have instead opted to play hardball with regulators. This is why in Canada anymore. Now, as outlets scrimp and scrape to get by, a new breed of tech companies is basically threatening to deliver a killing blow.

If the AI companies get their way, every piece of web content—whether it’s a painting, a blog, a recent novel, or a 4,000 word exposé from the New York Times—will be fodder for algorithms that are being openly marketed as an “efficient” way to replace many of the human creators behind those works.

Do we really want to live in a world where that’s the case? AI’s backers have largely framed it as a technological leap forward so profound that there is little that anyone can do but get out of its way. It is true that technological shifts do occasionally occur that are so momentous that they are largely beyond the average, everyday person’s control.

But that’s not the case here. The question of copyright law is very much in our control. Congress can make a decision that responsibly protects the Fourth Estate and creates new legal precedents that force tech companies to pay for the data they use when training their algorithms. If paying for content makes the AI industry unsustainable well, frankly, that’s just too damn bad.

One thing is clear: America needs the New York Times a whole lot more than it needs ChatGPT. There were a lot of cool gadgets this week but one little piece of hardware seems to have captured the hearts of tech nerds everywhere. That would be the “R1 AI Assistant,” a trinket produced by startup Rabbit, and designed with help from .

Technically, the R1 is considered “AI hardware”—an industry trend that is projected to grow by this year. Alongside Rabbit, you have companies like , which are that forego screens and apps for a more intuitive, LLM centric experience. Unlike Humane, however, Rabbit’s device is actually quite affordable, with a price tag of only $199.

Instead of deploying a LLM, the R1 uses something called a LAM—short of “large action model”—which supposedly can help manage your web activity for you, without you actually having to do the work yourself. If you can shell out the couple hundred bucks required, it could be a fun toy to have around the house.

Here’s some other stuff that happened this week..