AI is an opportunity for journalism, says consultant – 06/30/2023 – Market

In the presentation that ended this Friday (30) the congress of Wan-Ifra (World Association of News Editors), in Taiwan, consultant Juan Señor launched the innovation report produced annually by the entity, this time with almost monothematic attention to artificial intelligence .

It sought to emphasize that, more than a threat, AI is an opportunity for journalism to explore new revenue streams. “A third of what powers AI today is Wikipedia and corporate websites, a third is academia, and a third is journalism,” she says. “Whoever is building these platforms knows.”

Even so, he adds, “they’ve abused again, taken content without permission, it’s happened before and with ChatGPT-5, due out later this year, it’s going to happen again.” He says seven of his consulting clients are “rewriting their code to prevent this from happening again.”

He recalls that this is what Hollywood studios have already done, as well as the music platform Spotify and the distributor Getty Images. They blocked its content, until closing the deal. Señor defends charging “the cost of newsrooms and the risk of journalists’ lives to bring this content to the world”.

In addition to blocking content, he suggests “journalism with a watermark” as an alternative, saying that there are already some quality examples. He admits that the technology “is still in its infancy, it’s not quite there yet, although some innovations and a lot of work are being developed”.

He ventures that the amount of resources that AI can generate would be enough to “sustain the entire business” of journalism, in part by going further and being able to “destroy the duopoly” of Google and Meta. “It will decentralize the web, Microsoft will resurface, OpenAI, which is a consortium, could evolve into a company.”

Asked about journalism’s relationship with the two advertising revenue big techs, he commented: “It’s really dysfunctional. And we could be doing the same thing again. back. That’s where we are today”.

The situation reached the point where, with Facebook, “the marriage is over.” With Google, “there is still a relationship, but with a lot of tokenism”, referring to the practice of doing something just to avoid criticism, in this case, to give the impression that journalists are being treated fairly.

BASEBALL TACOS

In the corridors of the event, held at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, in the western region of the city, there was animosity between the vehicles and Google, the main sponsor and present in several congress panels.

The reason was the announcement by Google, on Thursday, of the decision to abandon the sharing of posts by journalistic companies in Canada, both in the search service and through tools such as Google News and Discover, due to the new law determining payment by link to vehicles.

There was astonishment among editors in Taipei, with one of them, from the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, presenting the platform’s chief news executive, Richard Gingras, with the cover of Friday’s issue — headlined “Google to remove news links Canadians due to the C-18 Act”, as it was named.

Gingras, a well-known character in journalistic debates as a representative of Google, publicly commented that he was no longer received at events with “ojigi”, the respectful Japanese greeting, but with baseball bats. He reiterated that, for the platform, the law makes the use of links “impractical”.

Another reason for friction with the editors, behind the scenes of the event, was the campaign carried out by Google in Brazil against bill 2620, called the fake news bill, due to the fact that it involved even its main tool, the search page , with a text attacking the new law, which ended up being withdrawn from the vote.