Press Gazette, the UK journalism trade magazine, has published an alarming study of how publications may be affected by Google’s AI Overviews feature that was rolled out to US users in May (though subsequently rolled back).

The study observed 3,300 search queries that the authors deemed were important for publishers based on traffic data from five publications. It measured how often AI Overviews were offered for those terms, and what the impact was to the prominence of sources — i.e. how far were the sources of information pushed down the results page.

Here’s a chart of one key finding:

The big unknown here, as the authors note, is precisely how broad Google’s use of AI Overviews will be. In this study, the summaries appeared on just over 23% of queries.

Read the full story.

‍

New York Times Union Urges Management to Reconsider 9 Art Department Cuts as Paper Ramps Up AI Tools. The Guild is saying a move to AI is to blame for cuts; management disgarees. The Wrap

AI’s coming inverted pyramid moment for journalism. An interesting column from David Cohn that considers how the act of journalism might change if AI eases the burden of writing and production. Poynter

After the Yahoo News app revamp, Yahoo preps AI summaries on homepage, too. Yahoo recently bought the buzzy news app Artifact, and it’s applying some of that tech to its well-visited properties. TechCrunch

‍

Perplexity AI has sought to downplay journalists’ fears that its new feature — “Perplexity Pages” — is explicitly designed to regurgitate original work wholesale with minimal attribution.

Forbes editor John Paczkowski took the AI start-up to task on X, saying did not even “bother to name us” when reusing key details from an investigative feature.

Bloomberg’s Shirin Ghaffary reports:

In a response, Perplexity Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas said the issues were because the company’s “Perplexity Pages” feature, which offers summarized information about topics of the day in a magazine-like layout, is still new and has “rough edges.”

“The pages and discover features will improve,” he wrote, “and we agree with the feedback you’ve shared that it should be a lot easier to find the contributing sources and highlight them more prominently.” Srinivas also stressed that Perplexity’s main search product cites sources more noticeably.

Paczkowski was unimpressed with Srinavas’ response, writing:

[T]his story, which you pushed to users, is little more than plagiarism. There is no clear attribution, just tiny logos where our work is treated with the same weight as reblogs. It’s not “rough” it’s theft.

Distinct echoes of Google’s own summarize-via-scrape AI Overviews, here, which also stands accused of doing the same thing. Publishing lobbying group the News/Media Alliance is calling for government intervention.

‍

Hot off the back of The Atlantic’s deal with OpenAI, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson shared some of his thinking via a video posted to LinkedIn:

My view is if it’s good for the company now, work with them. Just be prepared and hedge for it. Don’t become entirely dependent on it. Basically, look for deals that are good for you with eyes open about what could go wrong if the incentives of the company change.

All common sense stuff. But I find it hard to see how giving up your entire archive for training, for what risks being a one-time fee, can be helpful to news organisations in the long run. Nieman Labs has a longer post on Thompson's thoughts.

Yet another rather well established news site has been caught putting out lackluster AI-generated content. This time it’s BNN Breaking.

Kashmir Hill and Tiffany Hsu in the New York Times:

During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of “seasoned” journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune’s [self-reported audience]. Prominent news organizations like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian linked to BNN’s stories. Google News often surfaced them, too.

A closer look, however, would have revealed that individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. BNN’s “About Us” page featured an image of four children looking at a computer, some bearing the gnarled fingers that are a telltale sign of an A.I.-generated image.

How easily the site and its mistakes entered the ecosystem for legitimate news highlights a growing concern: A.I.-generated content is upending, and often poisoning, the online information supply.

As an added twist, the site didn’t make up identities for these false stories, instead attaching them to the bylines of real journalists with predictably miserable results. Read the full story here.

‍

Newsbreak: Most downloaded US news app ‘writes fiction’ using AI. A great investigation into shoddy AI use by NewsBreak, a Chinese-owned news aggregation service. Reuters

AI’s next challenge: how to forget. WIth some publishers fighting back against the archives being scraped by AI companies, how hard is it for large language models to “unlearn”? Politico

Sam Altman's OpenAI is paying publishers big money for content. That could be a lifeline — or blow up in their faces. Peter Kafka asks the question of whether news executives have learned anything from the failed media-tech pacts of the past. Business Insider ($)

‍

The News/Media Alliance has written to antitrust divisions at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to demand a federal intervention against Google’s AI Overviews — the generative AI-powered summary boxes the search engine is now providing at the top of many results.

Publishers are deeply concerned that AI Overviews will greatly reduce the amount of traffic that will flow from search results to webpages, cutting off advertising and any other revenue.

From the letter:

Google’s misappropriation of publishers’ content and its undermining of publishers’ monetization opportunities are not competition on the merits. They are yet another example of Google restricting competition for its own benefit. Agency intervention is necessary to stop the existential threat Google poses to original content creators.

Read the letter in full here.

‍

CNN’s Hadas Gold reveals how Hoodline, a network of local news sites that originated in San Francisco, has been quietly (and sometimes highly deceptively) using AI-generated articles to pad out its content. Gold writes:

[A] closer look at the bylines populating the local site and a national network of others — Sarah Kim, Jake Rodriguez, Mitch M. Rosenthal — reveals a tiny badge with the words “AI.” These are not real bylines. In fact, the names don’t even belong to real humans. The articles were written with the use of artificial intelligence.

A disclaimer page linked at the bottom of its pages notes to readers, “While AI may assist in the background, the essence of our journalism — from conception to publication — is driven by real human insight and discretion.”

Hoodline chief executive Zachary Chen defended the site, saying it plays an important role in covering news deserts across the US. However, while more recent AI articles have carried an “AI” motif, pages accessed through the Internet Archive told a murkier story. Gold continues:

Screenshots captured last year by the Internet Archive and local outlet Gazetteer showed Hoodline had further embellished its AI author bylines with what appeared to be AI-generated headshots resembling real people and fake biographical information. “Nina is a long-time writer and a Bay Area Native who writes about good food & delicious drink, tantalizing tech & bustling business,” one biography claimed.

This fakery, at least, has since been removed.

Gold’s piece should raise the alarm from any publisher thinking about using AI-generated work on their sites, and not just because it’s embarrassing and ethically questionable.

The News/Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,200 US publishers, has supported news organizations taking legal action against AI developers who are harvesting news content without permission. Danielle Coffey, the group’s chief executive, told CNN that Hoodline’s content “is likely a violation of copyright law.”

Read the full story.

OpenAI’s head of intellectual property and content, Tom Rubin, told an audience in Copenhagen that the AI giant would absolutely be looking to offer small publishers the same kind of handouts enjoyed by the likes of News Corp., the Financial Times and others.

According to UK publishing trade mag Press Gazette:

Rubin, formerly chief intellectual property strategy counsel at Microsoft, said it was “very important” that resources “don’t just go to large companies but that small, independent publications have the ability to learn and leverage the technology”.

He said despite OpenAI’s multiple partnerships so far “one of the things that we were very focused on is ensuring that the opportunity exists more broadly”.

Rubin also mentioned OpenAI had already donated “$5m” to the American Journalism Project to “help local newsrooms deploy the use of AI.” That has strong Google News Initiative vibes, to me, but let’s maybe keep an eye on it.

‍

The AI content deals are really rolling in thick and fast now. On Wednesday, both The Atlantic and Vox announced partnerships with OpenAI. No terms -- none whatsoever! -- were made public.

Axios' Sara Fischer had the scoop:

Both agreements also allow OpenAI to tap into the respective publishers' current content to fuel responses to user queries in OpenAI products, including ChatGPT.

OpenAI will include citations to their work when it's referenced in a response to a user query and will link out to the relevant article.

In a statement, The Atlantic said it will also work with OpenAI to help shape how news is surfaced and presented in any future real-time discovery products from OpenAI.

An interesting part of these deals is assessing what, in addition to the money, publishers are really getting in return when it comes to having access to OpenAI's technology. So far it mostly feels theoretical. From The Atlantic's statement on the deal:

As part of this agreement, The Atlantic and OpenAI are also collaborating on product and tech: The Atlantic’s product team will have privileged access to OpenAI tech, give feedback, and share use-cases to shape and improve future news experiences in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products. The Atlantic is currently developing an experimental microsite, called Atlantic Labs, to figure out how AI can help in the development of new products and features to better serve its journalism and readers––and will pilot OpenAI’s and other emerging tech in this work. (The Labs site will not involve the editorial team; it is a sandbox for our product and technology team. Additionally, AI is not being used to create The Atlantic’s journalism.)

If you're finding it hard to keep track of these deals, Columbia researcher Pete Brown has made this excellent tracker. OpenAI is way out in front.

Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for ‘F**ksmith’ to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue. When Google Search turns to Redditors for help, bad things happen. 404 Media ($)

OpenAI Is Making Journalism an Offer It Can’t Refuse. There is no opting out of artificial intelligence, so getting paid makes sense, but the deals with publishers don’t bode well for the future of newsgathering. Bloomberg Opinion (note: I wrote this.)

Game-Changers and Missteps in AI in Documentary Film. *”*Today I’ll be sharing the best and worst uses of AI I’ve come across in the wide, wonderful world of documentaries. Obviously, since documentaries tell, you know, true stories, it can be a particularly fraught area to incorporate AI.” No Film School

‍

The scramble for AI content deals continues with OpenAI sealing its rumored deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. From Fox Business:

The agreement allows Microsoft-backed OpenAI to display mastheads from major News Corp. publications in response to user questions, and to use current and archived content from several outlets in order to enhance its AI tools.

Covered outlets include: “The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and the New York Post in the U.S.; The Times and The Sun and others out of the U.K.; as well as multiple Australian publications like The Herald Sun and The Courier Mail.”

It's a big deal; a crop of widely-read publications with huge archives. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it a “proud moment for journalism and technology.” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson called Altman a “principled partner.” No further details about the deal were disclosed.

‍

As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple’s news app be a lifeline? Max Tani on how Apple News has become a key, and lucrative, distribution model for media companies large and small. Semafor

UK working on rules for training of AI models with creative work. UK's culture secretary promises stricter rules of the road for training AI, after concern raised by media and arts groups. Financial Times

How China is using AI news anchors to deliver its propaganda. News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible. The Guardian

‍