A coalition of UK media companies, including the Guardian, have urged industry peers to support a global framework to ensure AI companies get paid for the journalism they use.
The news provider is calling on publishing, broadcasting, media and news leaders to join its newly formed group aimed at protecting “original journalism” and securing the “long-term sustainability of our industry”.
The coalition comprising the Guardian, the BBC, the Financial Times, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has been named the Publisher Usage Rights Standard (Spur). It is calling for the establishment of a global licensing framework that would ensure AI companies can access high-quality journalism for use in products such as chatbots, while also guaranteeing that publishers retain control over their content and are paid fairly when they use it.
An open letter signed by BBC Director General Tim Davie; Guardian chief executive, Anna Bateson; Executive Chairman of Sky News, David Rhodes; TMG Chief Executive, Anna Jones; And the chief executive of the FT, John Slade, has warned that his industry’s business model has been undermined by AI.
“Across the industry, our reporting, our archives, our original content, have become the foundational training material for AI systems,” he wrote. “This content is scraped, copied and reused without any common standards to enable permission or payment, undermining the economic model that supports journalism.”
The letter states: “Working across the industry, we can create systems that respect original reporting, uphold public trust and enable both journalism and AI to thrive.”
Generative AI models, the term for the technology that underpins powerful tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPIT chatbot as well as Google’s video generator VO3, have to be trained on large amounts of data to generate their responses. The main source of this information is the open web, which contains a vast range of data, from content on Wikipedia and YouTube to newspaper articles and online book collections. The creative and publishing industries are demanding that AI companies get permission to use that work – and pay them for it.
As well as establishing licensing arrangements, the alliance aims to support the creation of technological tools that protect intellectual property, enable transparent use of journalism content and develop shared industry standards. Both the FT and the Guardian have signed content licensing deals with OpenAI.
