Plenty of white collar workers have been dusting off their CVs this year as the frenzy around ChatGPT and generative AI reaches a fever pitch. And while AI’s disruption will likely touch every office around the world, there have been none more nervous than journalists and the media organisations that employ them.
ChatGPT presents a unique threat to the news business. In plenty of industries, ChatGPT threatens workers, promising a future where employers are offered an alternative to human labour (if they’re willing to deal with the annoyingly-frequent AI hallucination). But, at this stage, it is only in the news business where ChatGPT threatens the economic model of the industry as well.
Simply, in the past 10 years, news organisations have driven all of their incremental revenue from web traffic. Google and Facebook, for all their flaws, have been the biggest source of clicks and those clicks have been monetised with display ads and sponsored content. However, ChatGPT threatens to take those clicks away. By finding the information for us, generative AI will take away our need to click through to a website. And with it, it will take away the ad dollars that our clicks deliver.
The media industry isn’t taking this lying down. In the United States, a coalition of giant media organisations including IAC, the New York Times and News Corp (backed by some of the world’s most powerful billionaires including Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch) are reportedly preparing a lawsuit challenging how these AI models have been trained. They believe their intellectual property has been unfairly used and reportedly will be asking for compensation that could “run into the billions”.
While media billionaires and tech billionaires make their lawyers rich battling it out in court, it is undeniable that the news business is going to change. This article from New York Magazine has canvased the experts and shares three theories on what this change will look like.
Will AI replace journalism? Will it improve it? It is too early to tell and it will likely take different shapes at different news organisations. But there is no doubt that it will be the front line of the AI disruption as it changes both how journalists work and how media organisations make money. We’re only at the very early days of this disruption.
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