How The Generative AI Boom Proves We Need Journalism

Danielle Coffey, CEO and president of the News/Media Alliance, believes journalism and generative AI can play nice.

But first, generative AI companies must get real about the value journalism brings to their products.

“This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game,” Coffey told AdExchanger. “These innovative technologies are very promising, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of journalism.”

AI companies acknowledge the value of journalism, Coffey said… So, she argued, they should look at working with journalists as part of the cost of doing business – similar to how Netflix or Spotify compensate content creators for their IP.

Click here to read the rest of the Q&A on AdExchanger‘s website.

Related:

News/Media Alliance Artificial Intelligence articles

Alliance CEO Op-Ed: Can AI companies and media publishers work together?

AI White Paper: How the Pervasive Copying of Expressive Works to Train and Fuel Generative Artificial Intelligence Systems Is Copyright Infringement And Not a Fair Use

AI Principles

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Opinion: Can AI companies and media publishers work together?

Licensing agreements and permissions would protect the news industry’s work while delivering higher-quality AI content

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape the digital economy and alter the online experience for millions of consumers. Systems that rely on large language models have already ushered in rapid changes to the news media landscape, and many journalists today are using these tools. But as these technologies become more prevalent, we must develop appropriate guardrails that protect the intellectual property rights of media publishers.

Every day, publishers in print and digital media invest in the creation of high-quality content that is informative, trustworthy and engaging.

Click here to read the rest of the op-ed on The Mercury News‘s website.

Related:

News/Media Alliance Artificial Intelligence articles

AI White Paper: How the Pervasive Copying of Expressive Works to Train and Fuel Generative Artificial Intelligence Systems Is Copyright Infringement And Not a Fair Use

AI Principles

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Arlington, VA – Today the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law will hold a hearing at 2:00 p.m. ET, on “Oversight of A.I.: The Future of Journalism,” which will explore the impact of the growth of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technology on publishers’ ability to provide high-quality journalism and possible oversight mechanisms to help protect and sustain quality journalism.

Witnesses scheduled to testify at the hearing include Danielle Coffey, President & CEO of the News/Media Alliance (written testimony here); Roger Lynch, CEO at Condé Nast (written testimony here); Curtis LeGeyt, President and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters (written testimony here); and author Jeff Jarvis (written testimony here).

Coffey’s comments before the Subcommittee will explain how Generative AI tools exploit news content to compete directly with publishers, yet need quality journalism to train their systems. Coffey will focus on the copyright infringement implications of how GAI developers train and use their models, as well as the need for legislation, including requiring transparency and responsibility from GAI developers, and passing the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA), which would allow publishers to collectively negotiate for fair compensation for use of their content by the dominant tech platforms, such as Meta and Google.

Since generative AI technology took off exponentially last year, the News/Media Alliance has been leading the call for AI companies to seek proper permissions and licensing from publishers for use of their valuable content. Last fall, the Alliance published a White Paper revealing that GAI systems copy massive amounts of publishers’ original works, almost always without authorization or compensation, and publisher content is overweighted in materials used for training these systems. The White Paper and comments the Alliance submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office also explain the legal implications of such use.

In response to the hearing, News/Media Alliance President & CEO, Danielle Coffey stated, “We commend Subcommittee Chair Richard Blumenthal and Ranking Member Josh Hawley and the Senate Judiciary Committee for recognizing the urgent need to address our very serious concerns about the impacts of AI technology on providers of quality journalism, as well as the legal questions this raises. AI companies are scraping our content to compete with it – usually without any compensation to, or permission from the publishers of that content – while they reap all the benefits. This is classic freeriding that infringes publishers’ copyrights and goes far beyond fair use.”

Coffey’s testimony offers multiple suggestions for policymakers, including:

• Recognizing that unauthorized use of publishers’ expressive content for commercial GAI training and development is likely to compete with and harm publisher businesses in a manner that infringes copyright;
• Creating transparency requirements to require the recordkeeping and disclosure of unauthorized training uses of material that is protected by copyright, by technical protection measures, or governed by contractual terms prohibiting scraping; and
• Adopting legislation to remedy existing market imbalances that prevent publishers from engaging in fair negotiations for the use of their content against dominant platforms.

A new report released by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in November found that the rate of newspaper closures has accelerated, now at 2.5 closures per week (with more than 130 confirmed newspaper closings or mergers in the last year), resulting in the expansion of news deserts, in which communities lack a source of local news.

Coffey concluded, “For years the tech platforms have gotten away with using publishers’ content without appropriate compensation. This problem, having gone unaddressed, has been getting worse and now, AI doubles down on the threat the largest tech platforms pose to publishers’ viability. Countries all over the world are introducing and passing legislation requiring the tech platforms to pay news publishers. The United States cannot fall behind other countries and should pass the JCPA, which will ensure publishers can continue to provide important high-quality journalism we all depend on. We have to act now before it’s too late.”

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Reports indicate meaningful monetary value is at stake and a willingness to limit license on display that comes with attribution commitments.

Coffey continued, “We represent the industry and are working on an option available to all publishers in a way that makes sense and provides equity and fairness. OpenAI is doing the right thing to ensure technology and quality journalism exist and thrive in harmony. Our members are exploring all options, and we are ensuring no one is left behind.”

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The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news, magazine, and digital media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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The News/Media Alliance, which merged with MPA – The Association of Magazine Media in July 2022 – works with its members to advance news and magazine industry priorities through advocacy, critical research, resources and events that demonstrate the value and importance of supporting and preserving a free and independent press.

“We are delighted to welcome these 16 news, magazine, and digital media organizations to the Alliance family, and we are grateful for their support and their recognition of the need to share a voice on important issues facing the industry,” stated News/Media Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey. “The support of these innovative, multimedia businesses are invaluable as we continue to advocate on behalf of the industry and fight for the future of journalistic and creative content.”

The need to support and sustain quality journalism has reached a new level of urgency this year, as the rapid adoption of generative AI has introduced yet another threat to publishers of original content. The Alliance published a White Paper in October that found AI companies significantly overweight publisher content in their crawling of the web – often while not paying the publishers who invested in producing that content – to train their generative AI systems, coming in direct competition with publishers, as well as infringing on publishers’ copyrights.

The Alliance continues to push for legislation to require Big Tech platforms such as Meta and Google to pay publishers for the use of their content, with the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) being reintroduced in the Senate earlier this year. Canada recently passed similar legislation, which is modeled after the law in Australia that has been extremely successful, and the California State Assembly introduced a state journalism compensation bill that was the subject of a Senate informational hearing last week.

In addition, the News/Media Alliance works on behalf of its members to advocate on press freedom/First Amendment issues, privacy, digital advertising, copyright, postal delivery and more.

New News/Media Alliance members in 2023 include (not a complete list):

• AlterNet
• American Craft Council
• California Broker Magazine
• The Economist
• Future PLC
• G/O Media Inc.
• Grandstand Publishing LLC
• The Guardian
• Hughes Media Corp.
• Raptive
• Raw Story
• Rookie Road
• Style Media Group Inc.
• Today Media Inc.
• Ziff Davis

Coffey continued, “We look forward to working with our new members and all of membership to move forward key legislative and policy initiatives and demonstrate the importance and need for high-quality content in an information-driven world.”

For more information about membership in the News/Media Alliance, please click here.

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The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news, magazine and digital media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Arlington, VA – Today News/Media Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey is attending as an invited participant in a bipartisan forum hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on “AI – Transparency, Explainability, Intellectual Property, & Copyright.”

This is the seventh AI Insight Forum that seeks to further innovation and develop bipartisan artificial intelligence legislation that takes the opportunities as well as the threats of AI technology into account. Also participating in the forum are 19 leaders from various industries, including the news media, entertainment, and tech industries.

Today’s Forum focuses on two key areas of AI policy: 1) transparency and explainability and 2) intellectual property and copyright, including addressing concerns around the use of copyrighted content in training and prompting. These are the most vital artificial intelligence concerns for the Alliance’s members.

In addition to a written statement provided in advance of the Forum, Coffey will provide oral remarks sharing the unique perspective of the news and magazine industry.

Coffey stated, “I am honored to be invited by Majority Leader Schumer, Senator Rounds, Senator Heinrich, and Senator Young to participate in this AI forum and I look forward to the dialogue. This is a critical time in the evolution of AI technology, and it is important to strike the right balance of creativity, innovation, regulation, and respect for existing rights. We must ensure that publishers of high-quality journalism whose content is being used to train AI systems have a seat at the table.”

The Alliance – whose members comprise over 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the U.S. and globally – has been leading the call since the advent of generative AI chatbots earlier this year for AI companies and developers to properly compensate publishers of quality journalism for use of their valuable content to train generative AI systems (GAI).

In April, the Alliance released AI Principles for the news and magazine media industry, which highlight the overarching principles that must guide the development and use of GAI systems as well as the policies and regulations governing them. Among other things, the AI Principles outline the need for GAI developers to obtain explicit permission for use of publishers’ intellectual property, and for publishers to be able to negotiate for fair compensation for use of their IP by these developers. In addition, the Alliance helped organize the publication of Global AI Principles in September, endorsed by 31 organizations representing thousands of creative professionals around the world, including news, entertainment, magazine, and book publishing companies and the academic publishing sector.

On October 31, the Alliance released a White Paper entitled, “How the Pervasive Copying of Expressive Works to Train and Fuel Generative Artificial Intelligence Systems Is Copyright Infringement And Not a Fair Use,” which shows that GAI systems have been developed by copying massive amounts of the expressive material published by the Alliance’s members, almost always without authorization or compensation, to create new products and services that frequently compete with Alliance member publishers.

The Alliance also recently submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the use of publisher content to power generative artificial intelligence technologies (GAI). The comments, White Paper and accompanying technical analysis together document the pervasive, unauthorized use of publisher content by GAI developers, the impact this may have on the sustainability and availability of high-quality original content, and the legal implications of such use.

The Copyright Office comments and the White Paper offer multiple recommendations to policymakers, including recognizing that unauthorized use of publishers’ expressive content for commercial GAI training and development is likely to compete with and harm publisher businesses in a manner that infringes copyright; creating transparency requirements to require disclosure of the use of copyright protected content in training; encouraging and facilitating effective licensing solutions; supporting international cooperation and harmonization on GAI regulations; and adopting legislation to remedy existing market imbalances that prevent publishers from engaging in fair negotiations for the use of their content against dominant platforms.

Coffey added, “For years the Big Tech platforms have gotten away with using our publishers’ content to add billions to their bottom lines, all while publishers have suffered. Now, the platforms and AI companies are scraping publisher content and using it to train their generative AI systems – again without compensating publishers. This goes far beyond fair use. Journalists, writers, publishers, and other creators make the investments and take the risks while generative AI developers reap the rewards of traffic, data, brand creation, subscription fees, and advertising dollars. This is freeriding, and it is antithetical to established copyright law and the public interest that it serves.”

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Arlington, VA – Yesterday, the News/Media Alliance published a White Paper and a technical analysis and submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the use of publisher content to power generative artificial intelligence technologies (GAI). Together, the three publications document the pervasive, unauthorized use of publisher content by GAI developers, the impact this may have on the sustainability and availability of high-quality original content, and the legal implications of such use. GAI systems have been developed by copying massive amounts of the expressive material published by the Alliance’s members, almost always without authorization or compensation, to create new products and services that frequently compete with Alliance member publishers.

The Alliance recognizes the exciting potential of GAI models and applications to improve aspects of our lives and supports the principled development of these systems. But this development must not come at the expense of publishers and journalists who invest considerable time and resources producing material that keeps our communities informed, safe, and entertained, and holds our government officials and other decision makers in check. The Alliance and its members would welcome working with GAI developers to help build and grow these technologies in a sustainable and responsible manner.

While the Copyright Office submission and White Paper discuss the wider publisher landscape in the face of the GAI revolution, including relevant principles of copyright law, the accompanying technical analysis documents the extent to which GAI developers rely on high-quality journalistic content to power their models. In particular, the results show:

• GAI developers have copied and used news, magazine and digital media content to train large language models (LLMs).
• Popular curated datasets underlying LLMs significantly overweight publisher content by a factor ranging from over 5 to almost 100 as compared to the generic collection of content that the well-known entity Common Crawl has scraped from the web.
• Other studies show that news and digital media ranks third among all categories of sources in Google’s C4 training set, which was used to develop Google’s GAI-powered products like Bard. Half of the top ten sites represented in the data set are news outlets.
• The LLMs also copy and use publisher content in their outputs. The LLMs can reproduce the content on which they were trained, demonstrating that the models retain and can memorize the expressive content of the training works.

Alliance President & CEO Danielle Coffey stated, “The research and analysis we’ve conducted shows that AI companies and developers are not only engaging in unauthorized copying of our members’ content to train their products, but they are using it pervasively and to a greater extent than other sources. This shows they recognize our unique value, and yet most of these developers are not obtaining proper permissions through licensing agreements or compensating publishers for the use of this content. This diminishment of high-quality, human created content harms not only publishers but the sustainability of AI models themselves and the availability of reliable, trustworthy information.”

The Copyright Office comments and the White Paper offer multiple recommendations to policymakers, including recognizing that unauthorized use of publishers’ expressive content for commercial GAI training and development is likely to compete with and harm publisher businesses in a manner that infringes copyright; creating transparency requirements to require disclosure of the use of copyright protected content in training; encouraging and facilitating effective licensing solutions; supporting international cooperation and harmonization on GAI regulations; and adopting legislation to remedy existing market imbalances that prevent publishers from engaging in fair negotiations for the use of their content against dominant platforms.

Coffey continued, “Generative AI systems should be held responsible and accountable, just like any other business. This White Paper demonstrates that these systems rely on journalistic and creative content, which have the benefit of investment in quality on the front end, as well as publishers who are required by law to take responsibility for the content they share with the public. Continued unauthorized use will harm existing markets that acknowledge the value of archived and real-time quality content, and over time the GAI models themselves will deteriorate. You get out what you put in. It is critical that our copyright protections are properly enforced and that high standards of quality and accountability are the foundation of these and other new technologies.”

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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The News/Media Alliance has produced a White Paper, “How the Pervasive Copying of Expressive Works to Train And Fuel Generative Artificial Intelligence Systems Is Copyright Infringement and Not a Fair Use.”

The Alliance also filed a comprehensive submission addressing copyright and artificial intelligence with the U.S. Copyright Office, to aid the Office in its study and all branches of government on these issues. The Alliance’s reply submission focused on responding to flawed arguments by developers or investors that pushed incomplete and inaccurate views of copyright law.

Download the White Paper (PDF)

Download Copyright Office Comments (PDF)

Download Copyright Office Reply Comments (PDF) (December 2023)

About the White Paper and Copyright Office Comments

On October 30, 2023, the News/Media Alliance published a White Paper, including an incorporated technical analysis, and comments submitted to the Copyright Office focusing on generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers’ unauthorized use of publisher content.

The Alliance recognizes the potential benefits and is broadly supportive of AI applications and technologies. While the interests of publishers and generative AI developers could align, for example, in a fair exchange of licensing revenues for access to high-quality training materials, this promise of partnership has not yet materialized except in a few narrow instances. Instead, many generative AI developers have chosen to scrape publisher content without permission and use it for model training and in real-time to create competing products. While publishers make the investments and take the risks, generative AI developers reap the rewards in terms of users, data, brand creation, and advertising dollars. The continued unlicensed use of journalistic reporting portends injury to the public interest that it serves and may hinder the progress of generative AI innovations.

Together, the White Paper and the Technical Analysis make multiple findings, including:

• Developers have copied and used news, magazine and digital media content to train LLMs.
• Popular curated datasets underlying LLMs significantly overweight publisher content by a factor ranging from over 5 to almost 100 as compared to the generic collection of content that the well-known entity Common Crawl has scraped from the web.
• Other studies show that news and digital media ranks third among all categories of sources in Google’s C4 training set, which was used to develop Google’s generative AI-powered products like Bard. Half of the top ten sites represented in the data set are news outlets.
• LLMs also copy and use publisher content in their outputs. LLMs can reproduce the content on which they were trained, demonstrating that the models retain and can memorize the expressive content of the training works.

View full White Paper 

The Alliance’s comments to the Copyright Office address further questions related to the use of publisher content in generative AI products and services, including the potential for licensed solutions, including on a voluntary, collective basis, existing legal standards to determine when textual outputs may be substantially similar to news and media articles, and methods to obtain consent from copyright owners to the use of their materials for AI training.

Based on the conclusions these findings, recommendations from the Alliance include:

• The Copyright Office should clarify publicly that use of publishers’ expressive content for commercial generative AI training and development is likely to compete with and harm publisher businesses, which is disfavored as a fair use.
• Substantial transparency measures should develop around the ingestion of copyrighted materials for uses in generative AI technologies.
• Further development of relevant licensing models should be encouraged, including by acknowledging the potential feasibility of voluntary collective licensing to facilitate licensing for ingestion of news and media materials for generative AI purposes.
• The Copyright Office should swiftly promulgate an updated registration option to enable online news publishers to register groups of news articles published online.
• Considering the large bargaining power disparity between media publishers and very large online platforms, measures to correct this negotiating disparity, such as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, should be supported.
• Measures to address the scraping of protected content from third-party pirate websites should be adopted.

View full Copyright Office Comments

Additional Resources:

Press Release: News/Media Alliance Study Finds Pervasive Unauthorized Use of Publisher Content to Power Generative AI Technologies (October 30, 2023) 

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Arlington, VA – Today 26 organizations representing thousands of creative professionals around the world, including news, entertainment, magazine, and book publishing companies and the academic publishing sector, released Global Principles for Artificial Intelligence (AI). A first of their kind, these pioneering Global Principles provide guidance for the development, deployment, and regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and applications to ensure business opportunities and innovation can thrive within an ethical and accountable framework. The Global Principles for AI are aimed at ensuring publishers’ continued ability to create and disseminate quality content, while facilitating innovation and the responsible development of trustworthy AI systems.

Addressing critical dimensions relating to intellectual property, transparency, accountability, quality and integrity, fairness, safety, design, and sustainable development, the Global Principles for AI mark an unprecedented collaboration that safeguards the interests of content creators, publishers, and consumers alike.

In the Principles, the organizations call for the responsible development and deployment of AI systems and applications, stating that these new tools must only be developed in accordance with established principles and laws that protect publishers’ intellectual property, brands, consumer relationships, and investments. The Principles state explicitly that AI systems’ “indiscriminate misappropriation of our intellectual property is unethical, harmful, and an infringement of our protected rights.”

News/Media Alliance President and CEO Danielle Coffey stated, “These Global AI Principles demonstrate the widespread agreement of publishers around the world that their intellectual property, which is the product of significant investments they have made in providing quality journalistic and creative content, should be recognized and respected. AI systems are only as good as the content they use to train them, and therefore developers of generative AI technology must recognize and compensate publishers accordingly for the tremendous value their content contributes to the development of these systems.”

Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint stated, “For decades, our member companies have pursued opportunities to bring trusted news and entertainment to new platforms and new distribution channels enabled by the internet. We know from experience that principles like these are necessary to make certain those opportunities continue to proliferate and serve as a guidepost for businesses and policymakers who are wrestling with the ethical and legal questions surrounding AI.”

Angela Mills Wade, Executive Director of the European Publishers Council stated, “The Global Principles for AI pave the way for a powerful convergence of innovation and ethical development of AI. We invite regulators to establish legal frameworks which boost innovation and create new business opportunities, while ensuring that AI develops in a way that is responsible and sustainable for the publishing and journalism sectors in full respect of their intellectual property rights.”

Among other things, the Global AI Principles stipulate that developers, operators, and deployers of AI systems should:

• Respect intellectual property rights protecting the organizations’ investments in original content.
• Leverage efficient licensing models that can facilitate innovation through training of trustworthy and high-quality AI systems.
• Provide granular transparency to allow publishers to enforce their rights where their content is included in training datasets.
• Clearly attribute content to the original publishers of the content.
• Recognise publishers’ invaluable role in generating high-quality content for training, and also for surfacing and synthesizing.
• Comply with competition laws and principles and ensure that AI models are not used for anti-competitive purposes.
• Promote trusted and reliable sources of information and ensure that AI generated content is accurate, correct and complete.
• Not misrepresent original works.
• Respect the privacy of users that interact with them and fully disclose the use of their personal data in AI system design, training, and use.
• Align with human values and operate in accordance with global laws.

The full Global AI Principles, which can be found online, elaborate on each of the points above in greater detail.

Organizations signing onto the Global AI Principles include:

• AMI – Colombian News Media Association
• Asociación de Entidades Periodísticas Argentinas (Adepa)
• Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers
• Associação Nacional de Jornais (Brazilian Newspaper Association) (ANJ)
• Czech Publishers’ Association
• Danish Media Association
• Digital Content Next
• European Magazine Media Association
• European Newspaper Publishers’ Association
• European Publishers Council
• FIPP
• Grupo de Diarios América
• Inter American Press Association
• Korean Association of Newspapers
• Magyar Lapkiadók Egyesülete (Hungarian Publishers’ Association)
• NDP Nieuwsmedia
• News/Media Alliance
• News Media Association
• News Media Canada
• News Media Europe
• News Media Finland
• News Publishers’ Association
• Nihon Shinbun Kyokai (The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association)
• Professional Publishers Association
• STM
• World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA)

The Global AI Principles can be found on the News/Media Alliance website here.

The Principles are open to future signatories.

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,000 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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Arlington, VA – Today the News/Media Alliance released new AI Principles that provide overarching guidance for generative artificial intelligence (GAI) systems’ use of journalistic and creative content. The Principles cover issues with respect to GAI developers’ use of members’ content related to intellectual property, transparency, accountability, fairness, safety, and design and apply to all content, including text, images, audiovisual and all other formats.

The News/Media Alliance represents over 2,000 print and digital news and magazine media companies, from small, local outlets to national and international publications read around the world. Every day, these publishers invest in producing high-quality creative content that is engaging, informative, trustworthy, accurate and reliable. They not only make significant economic contributions in this content, but they also play a crucial role in educating and informing our communities, ensuring a strong democracy and economy.

“The Principles emphasize that emerging technologies such as AI must continue to respect publishers’ intellectual property (IP), brands, reader relationships, and investments made in creating quality journalistic and creative content,” stated News/Media Alliance Executive Vice President and General Counsel Danielle Coffey. “Publishers must be fairly compensated for the tremendous value their content contributes to the development of generative AI technology. It’s a simple exchange of value.”

The News/Media Alliance’s Principles stipulate that GAI developers and deployers must negotiate with publishers for the right to use their content in any of the following manners:

• Training: Including publishers’ content in datasets and using it for GAI system training and testing.
• Surfacing: The serving of publishers’ content in response to user inputs, possibly including a cover note generated by the GAI system of what is contained in the surfaced content.
• Synthesizing: Summaries, explanations, analyses etc. of source content in response to a query.

Among other things, the AI Principles outline the need for GAI developers to obtain explicit permission for use of publishers’ intellectual property, and publishers should have the right to negotiate for fair compensation for use of their IP by these developers.

The Alliance has been advocating for the passage of the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA), which would allow publishers to negotiate collectively with the Big Tech platforms for fair compensation for use of their content, including use for AI purposes. Currently, publishers do not have the ability to negotiate these deals on their own, as the dominant tech platforms capture the majority of U.S. digital ad revenue, leaving publishers with little to reinvest in the production of high-quality journalism. The bill, which nearly passed into law in 2022, was reintroduced in the Senate in March 2023 and has strong bipartisan support.

Coffey added, “The tech platforms clearly cannot be trusted to self-regulate and instead, are increasing their anticompetitive behavior to the detriment of local journalism. We must ensure that value is rightfully returned to the creators of quality journalism, which in turn will be reinvested in providing the content that our country wants, needs and depends on to stay informed.”

The AI Principles can be found on the Alliance website here.

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,000 news and magazine media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

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