In ways that may be large or still small, artificial intelligence is part of our lives in new ways. Many of us are using it now, for sifting data, for doing research, for testing marketing concepts, for customer service, and lots more. Many more of us will be using it going forward.
And sooner or later, we’re all going to have to deal with AI, even though generative AI is still in its embryonic stages and no one can say with any confidence where the technology will be in 12 short months.
(And let’s note that some of the AI “stories” and summaries you can find in Google searches and on social media are comically bad.)
For the media business, though, it’s serious business. For now, AI is most commonly used on the internal side—not directly involved in revenue generation, but by creating more efficient processes, freeing up humans for higher-level work. But using AI directly to generate revenue is coming as well. It’s a matter of when.
Here are a few things to consider.
- AI and our intellectual property
- AI and search
The IP part covers two things. Copyright violations on the one hand, and whether to allow large learning models to train on our media content on the other.
On the copyright front, Using media content as its basis makes AI better, and enables those obviously fake social media images and summaries to get better. As AI improves, it becomes more likely that it will use your articles, images, photos—anything you create—without your knowledge, because your content turns up in plenty of external places after you publish it. And then, AI will synthesize your material with hundreds of other content elements, and it becomes much harder to trace back to the original source.
It’s a big challenge and a fast-growing area of media copyright law.
The other part is related to the first and for some observers, it’s an existential development. Google has been summarizing its search findings using its own AI technology. So a searcher more often than not gets what they need in the summary and doesn’t have to click through to the source. That, of course, will deprive content-related websites a huge amount of traffic, and therefore, ad revenue.
This has been generating enormous interest, and I haven’t heard a single media-company CEO express anything but concern. I have heard some people note, though, that Google creates ad inventory—it gets its revenue—from clicking through on searches. To deprive itself of that revenue source seems counterintuitive.
Both of these developments lead to a third: Should media operators grant AI companies access to their content in exchange for remuneration? Many companies, including Forbes, Conde Nast, and Axel Springer have done that. Others, like the New York Times, have sued AI companies to stop them from using their content.
If you’re a media professional, all these things and more are important to your company and your career, and should be kept track of.