Amid the growing use of technology as a source of current affairs, AI-generated news should be labeled “nurturing” and tech companies should pay publishers for the content they use, according to a left-of-centre think tank.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said AI companies are rapidly emerging as the new “gatekeepers” of the Internet and interventions are needed to create a healthy AI news environment.
It recommended standardized labels for AI-generated news, showing what information was used to generate those answers, including peer-reviewed studies and articles from professional news organizations. It also urged the establishment of a licensing regime in the UK, allowing publishers to negotiate with tech companies over the use of their content in AI news.
“If AI companies are going to profit from journalism and shape what the public sees, they must be paid fairly for the news they consume and operate under clear rules that protect pluralism, trust, and the long-term future of independent journalism,” said Roa Powell, IPPR senior research fellow and co-author of the report.
The IPPR said work on licensing could be initiated by the UK competition regulator using its new enforcement powers over Google. The Competition and Markets Authority this week proposed giving web publishers and news organizations the power to stop Google from scraping their content for its observations. IPPR said that collective licensing deals would ensure that a wide range of publishers are included.
According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Google’s AI overview now reaches 2 billion users per month and about a quarter of those people use AI to get information.
Copyright law should remain unchanged to ensure the growth of the licensing market, IPPR said, while the government should encourage new business models for news that are not dependent on the tech sector, including supporting the BBC and local news providers.
“With the right policies, the government can shape this market so that UK news organizations can transform their business models for the AI age and “AI companies improve the credibility of their products by relying on trusted sources,” the report said.
IPPR tested four AI tools – ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google Gemini and Perplexity – by entering 100 news-related questions into those platforms and analyzing more than 2,500 links produced by the AI responses.
ChatGPT and Gemini did not cite BBC journalism, which has blocked the bots they use to collect answers, while Overviews and Perplexity used BBC content despite the broadcaster’s objections to the tools their journalism used.
IPPR found that the Telegraph, GB News, The Sun and the Daily Mail were cited in less than 4% of responses on ChatGPT, while the Guardian – which has a licensing deal with ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI – was used as a source in almost six in 10 responses. The Financial Times, which also has a licensing deal with OpenAI, also ranked highly. The Guardian was also the most common source used by Geminis, appearing in half of all answers.
Google’s use of AI summaries at the top of search results has impacted click-through traffic for publishers, hurting their revenues as many users read overviews without moving on to the original journalism.
IPPR said questions needed to be asked about how financial relationships between AI companies and news providers shaped the answers.
“If licensed publications feature more prominently in AI answers, there is a risk of locking out smaller and local news providers, who are less likely to get AI deals,” the report said.
IPPR said that although licensing deals may compensate for lost advertising revenue to some extent, they will not maintain a healthy news ecosystem. The think tank said they could make news organizations dependent on tech giants for revenue and that income could easily disappear if copyright protections are weakened.
The IPPR said there should be public funding to create new business models for investigative news and local news, whose sustainability could be at risk due to the rise of AI news, and for the BBC to “innovate with AI”.
