Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Journalism has entered an era of love-hate relationships with AI. In December, The New York Times became the first major media organization to take a chatbot creator to court.

News clip: The New York Times suing OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The Times says that millions of articles published in the paper were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with it as a source of reliable information.

News clip: The suit says that the defendants should be held responsible for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages".

Brooke Gladstone: OpenAI told NBC that it hopes to "find a mutually beneficial way to work together as we are doing with many other publications", and so it is.

News clip: OpenAI they deal with parent company of Politico and Business Insider, that's Axel Springer. The multi-year agreement compensating Axel Springer for the content OpenAI will use to generate answers on ChatGPT and train its models.

Brooke Gladstone: The Associated Press signed a similar deal with OpenAI earlier last year. Now, OpenAI is reportedly in talks with CNN, the Fox News Corporation, and Time to license their work. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in an earnings release earlier this week that the company much prefers "negotiation to litigation." On Monday, Microsoft which holds a major stake in OpenAI's for-profit arm and has the right to commercialize its inventions, announced partnerships with five news organizations; Semafor, the Craig Newmark, CUNY Journalism School, the Online News Association, GroundTruth, and Nota, itself an AI company designed for publishers. Of course, not all these deals are the same.

John Herrman: Well, there are two kinds of deals that we're hearing about, and they often get muddled together, which I think generally works to the benefit of OpenAI and Microsoft here.

Brooke Gladstone: John Herrman is a tech columnist for New York Magazine.

John Herrman: One kind of deal is with Semafor, with GroundTruth, with the Craig Newmark school at CUNY, the ONA, and Nota. These are deals that are providing access to AI tools for news gathering and news production to experiment with large language models, text generation tools to see if there's some way that these can make news production easier or quicker or more effective, or if there are ways to use AI to like dig into big datasets. That's all very interesting and appealing to think about as someone who works in media.

The other kind of partnership, which is much more consequential and also much more tense is the type of partnership that OpenAI has with Axel Springer, for example, which is the parent company for Business Insider and a bunch of German language publications. That involves OpenAI paying a licensing fee of tens of millions of euros over a few years to put Axel Springer news and content and analysis into OpenAI products like ChatGPT. That's the result of a little bit more of a negotiation to avoid conflict or potentially to avoid lawsuits. They're really two very different kinds of partnerships.

Brooke Gladstone: Then you've got in December, the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement. What was the Times's argument?

John Herrman: The Times filed what I think many of the industry see as the definitive and most credible lawsuit of its kind against an AI firm, alleging that OpenAI had trained its models on years and years of New York Times content, that this training was not covered under fair use. That not only was OpenAI using this data to create software that could compete with the New York Times product by creating articles that were pretty solid, but also that you could get ChatGPT to regurgitate full passages from published New York Times content, which challenges the core defense that OpenAI had mounted for months at that time, that these models don't contain information, they just contain statistical relationships between different things that can produce similar outputs.

Now, OpenAI says that that's a glitch and that they're fixing it. That this is a question that isn't simply resolvable by shouting fair use. This is new territory and that at the very least, there needs to be precedent set around this question.

Brooke Gladstone: I've seen the New York Times lawsuit framed as a fight for the future of journalism. Do you think this is an existential battle?

John Herrman: I think that, broadly speaking, the fact that these new AI technologies can automate at least the basic processes of a lot of what we think of as creative work does present a real threat to, if not the practice of journalism or being a musician, they do present a clear threat to, for lack of a better term, the business models of creativity. I think that's really, really obvious. I don't necessarily think that the fates of the New York Times and OpenAI tell the whole story. OpenAI is probably the premier AI firm in the public's mind right now, but lots of companies are developing very similar technologies

Brooke Gladstone: The New York Times is one of the nation's premier news outlets even if people frequently quibble over it so I would think if anything would determine the direction of where this would go, it might be this lawsuit.

John Herrman: I don't want to minimize the potential influence that they have here, but in the current media environment, the New York Times is also an interesting and strange outlier. I should disclose that I worked there for seven years. It's very large, it's doing very well, it's subscription-supported, one of a very small number of truly national news organizations. What matters for the New York Times doesn't necessarily matter for the rest of the news industry in a clear way, but I do think that the outcome of this lawsuit could set a valuable precedent. I also think it's worth reading the actual text of the lawsuit and OpenAI's response to get some background here, which is that they were in negotiations for a deal that might have been quite a bit like Axel Springer's deal, considering licensing options, what equitable fee might look like, and then things fell apart.

Brooke Gladstone: Would you say it's fair to conclude that the AI companies are motivated to partner with news in order to prevent similar kinds of lawsuits like that being brought by the New York Times?

John Herrman: I think that it's fair to read, for example, the Axel Springer deal as a way to both suggest that these partnerships are possible and also to say to other news organizations, "Hey, let's talk first," from the perspective of news organizations. The arrival of these generative AI tools was very abrupt, very threatening, and came on the tail end of a long and disappointing era of tech and media partnerships,

Brooke Gladstone: Right. You wrote in your piece that it's easy to fold such deals into the prevailing narrative of AI dominance. Has venerable publishers lined up to partner with tech firms once again, despite what happened last time around and the time before that and the time before that? You mentioned some deals in the past. In the 2010s, Facebook they approached news organizations like the New York Times and said, "Hey, now we're going to focus on videos. You should be doing video." In order to keep traffic flowing, news organizations did divert a lot of their increasingly diminishing resources to producing video to go on Facebook. Then what happened?

John Herrman: When Facebook started sending lots and lots of readers to news publishers and news publishers started adapting their strategies to cater to those visitors and to reach more people on social media, Facebook sensed an opportunity. In the mid-2010s, they were thinking, "Oh, we need to compete with YouTube. Everything is going to be video in the future. How can we build that out ourselves?"

One cheap way to do that was to partner with companies like the Times and say, "Hey, if you produce, for example, live video broadcast for us on a regular schedule for this period of time, we'll pay you a few million dollars. You will get lots and lots of viewership because our platform is now funneling people to these new video features. This is a win-win for you guys."

It all felt good at the time. What happens then is news organizations staffed up for live video, even if that wasn't something they were good at before. They produced these videos for a limited time. I think about a year. Then because it was companies like the New York Times and BuzzFeed industry leaders that were doing this, lots of smaller companies that didn't have direct partnerships, they think, "Oh, we should pivot to video too." You get these people chasing these somewhat artificial trends ending up out on a limb when Facebook decides that maybe live video isn't going to be the main thing that people see on Facebook. That was the recurring story of the 2010s.

Brooke Gladstone: Are the businesses of AI and journalism essentially compatible or not?

John Herrman: I think they should be considered essentially incompatible. These are very different types of firms doing different things, but with interest that sometimes align. The Times, in particular, has been fairly open to deals with companies like Google and Meta but has also been fairly cautious. It's a big institution. There's a lot of resistance to fundamental change there, which has worked out in their favor in this case.

They might take a few million dollars from Google to produce a series of VR videos that you have to view by putting your smartphone in a cardboard pair of goggles and they can do that without disrupting their business operations and maybe pocketing a little bit of money, but when they do that, it can often be mistaken for what everyone else has to do. In an industry where virtually every news organization is desperate for the next thing, anything that might provide future revenue streams, that's a serious danger. I think it's returning with AI.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you think that these deals are just about trying to cash in for now even if this thing kills them down the road?

John Herrman: Yes, I think that's a fair way to look at, for example, the Axel Springer deal. One thing it's worth pointing out here is that what OpenAI is paying for is the right to include links from articles and content from articles in products like ChatGPT. This contract is premised on the idea that everyone is going to be using this and, of course, they're also going to be using these chatbots to keep up with the news. There are a lot of predictions implicit in this deal that won't necessarily come true. Maybe chatbots aren't the future of news. In that case, Axel Springer looks pretty smart in hindsight.

The other possibility is that these AI technologies are going to find their way into virtually everything we use on the internet and the way that they collect and represent up-to-date information about the world is potentially a serious problem for them and something they're going to have to spend a lot of money on. In that case, in hindsight, Axel Springer might not look so smart. They might look like they gave something away for a lower price than they should have.

If the web is becoming ragged and full of spam and AI-generated content, if our real-time sources of information like Twitter or X and Instagram and Google search they're all becoming polluted, maybe having a consistent feed of reported reliable valuable information about the outside world is incredibly valuable to an AI firm in the future.

Brooke Gladstone: You've worked with BuzzFeed and at the New York Times when both companies were experimenting with new technologies and big tech partnerships. Déjà vu, maybe? Does this moment feel different?

John Herrman: This moment feels different than, for example, the era of rising social media because at least then there was a sense of synergy and collaboration. A bunch of people are using Facebook, but they're also reading news there. We make news and so maybe this works out somehow. Here we've got the arrival of new technologies that are just basically automating some of the basic functions of news production.

Now you can argue and I think convincingly that they're nowhere near capable of producing valuable stories, valuable analysis, but they're trying and so it's a little more antagonistic to start. This isn't about two industries aligning temporarily and then drifting apart inevitably. This is two industries smashing into each other right at the beginning of their relationship.

Brooke Gladstone: You said to our producer, "What were we supposed to do with Facebook? People did different things, but no one won."

John Herrman: Right. That's the tragedy of covering the media's relationship with tech for the last decade, is that people made a lot of mistakes, but even in hindsight, it wasn't clear what most news organizations were supposed to do. Social media took away what was left of their revenue models. It said, "Hey, we are a better advertising product than you are." "Hey, we're better at attracting huge numbers of readers than you are." What's left for you is the expensive work of gathering and publishing news.

Yes, there is some déjà vu here with AI tools where there are smarter decisions and there are unwise decisions that you might make now, but we are also at the beginning of potentially a pretty big change in how people interact with information. I have to be frank, it's scary.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much, John.

John Herrman: Thanks for having me on.

Brooke Gladstone: John Herrman is a tech columnist for New York Magazine.

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