Media execs sound alarm on AI
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The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, New York Times CEO and president Meredith Kopit Levien and Status founder Oliver Darcy onstage during the Status Summit in New York on Sept. 9. Photo: West Third Films for Status
Top media leaders across print, digital and broadcast warned about AI's impacts on journalism at the inaugural Status Summit last week.
Why it matters: News publishers recognize that they need to embrace AI to survive the transition to an agentic web, but they refuse to broker deals with companies they feel are illegally scraping their content.
What they're saying: Speaking onstage to Status founder Oliver Darcy last Wednesday, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said large language model developers "as far as we see it ... have engaged in theft of intellectual property and creative expressive work on a scale that is unprecedented."
- As it relates to the Times, they've "stolen our stuff," she said.
- The Times, which has sued OpenAI and Microsoft in a landmark copyright lawsuit, has struck partnerships with AI firms, such as Amazon, when they believe terms are equitable.
Zoom in: The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson echoed some of her thoughts, but went a step further, saying "AI is gonna turn our business upside down."
- The Atlantic has led the publishing industry in striking deals with a wide variety of AI companies, including OpenAI. But it's also joined a publisher lawsuit against Cohere.
- While Thompson said he is "100%, absolutely" glad The Atlantic signed its OpenAI deal, he said the magazine company will fight AI firms that train on its content without acceptable terms.
- He noted that The Atlantic's search traffic is getting "crushed" as Google shifts its search focus to AI interfaces.
Zoom out: Publishers have been pushing for collective bargaining rights to negotiate better deals with tech firms long before the AI boom, but efforts to secure an antitrust exemption for negotiating around ad deals has stalled in Congress.
- Former CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon noted that local broadcasters that are trying to consolidate need to address how their scale can actually benefit journalism and support a sustainable business.
- She mentioned efforts to negotiate more favorable terms from technology, social and AI companies as something a company looking to scale could consider.
The big picture: The rapid rise of generative AI has put pressure on Washington to quickly address how to regulate Big Tech.
- AI executives have been calling on Congress to pass federal mandates to rein them in, but there's been little appetite on Capitol Hill to address copyright reforms. Those debates have largely been left to the courts.
The bottom line: Kara Swisher, a veteran tech journalist, told Darcy, "We're at that moment where tech and politics has to merge."
