Meta is daring the news industry to sue. It should.
If news publishers don't stand up for themselves now, they're going to get steamrolled by AI.
We’re in the endgame now. As The Washington Post reported last week, after declaring itself out of the news business, Meta/Facebook is now promoting news synopses via its new AI interface, creatively named Meta AI. The summaries consist of several bullet points and while they do include footnotes, the source for the news is not visible unless you click on a “View Sources” link. Here’s what it looks like:
You may note at the bottom the bot also refers users to the AP and Al Jazeera. So now, in addition to harvesting the work of other reporters risking their lives to cover a hot war a continent away, Meta is also picking “winners” when referring users to news sites. At least here they’re flagging one of the sites from which the bot stole aggregated the news. It’s also worth noting that all four citations for the news summary above were pulled from Al Jazeera.
To quote former Time Man of the Year Jeffrey Lebowski, this aggression will not stand.
When I first started this Substack, one of the headlines/topics I flagged was that news organizations should sue more. This is one of those times. Without legal protections of some kind, what mechanisms are there to stop Meta or other AI-producing companies from simply stealing the work of journalists for their own engagement plays? Right now these companies argue that the news is part of the public domain and that reproducing it in this manner falls under fair use. But how, pray tell, did this news enter the public domain without the work of journalists publishing these words on copyrighted websites for their AI bots to crawl over it?
Mark Zuckerberg is drinking the news industry’s milkshake. And unless a court tells him he can’t do it, he’s going to keep slurping it up and repackaging the work of others for his company’s benefit. If companies like Meta are allowed to choke out news organizations by siphoning off ad revenues (already accomplished in the early 2000s) and flat out stealing their original work, what hope is there for the survival of the news industry?
The New York Times filed suit again OpenAI/Microsoft for their unauthorized use of Times articles to train ChatGPT. The step by Meta is equally egregious and demands legal action.
This is the time in which humans are going to craft and shape the norms for what is and is not acceptable when it comes to artificial intelligence. It is vital that the news industry draw a line in the sand and defend their copyrighted work. If it does not, we’re just going to see more and more AI news summaries and less and less original work from the journalists who actually brought the news to light.
Hi, I’m Mike. I’m a former editor for The Washington Post and ESPN. In 2024 I founded and now operate Launcher, LLC, a digital media consultancy operating out of Arlington, Va. Want to work together? Reach out on LinkedIn.