Rupert Murdoch said News Corp is “absolutely focused” on “both the opportunities and challenges” posed by the rise of advanced artificial intelligence tools.
At News Corp’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday in his new role as chairman emeritus, Murdoch revealed that the owner of The Post and the Wall Street Journal is already immersed in negotiations related to supplying original content to companies that create communication tools. generative artificial intelligence.
“Our digital development has allowed us to expand the delivery of news, analysis, books and real estate intelligence,” Murdoch said. “In an era of generative AI, those companies are sure to grow.”
Murdoch also noted that News Corp is determined to ensure that AI tools compensate news organizations for their content. This week, a study published by Columbia University estimated that Google and Meta alone would have to pay more than $14 billion a year to media outlets to account for search advertising revenue.
“We are already playing a leading role in the important debate about the value of our original content to AI vendors and are engaged in advanced negotiations with key partners,” Murdoch said.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson noted that the company has “led the quest for compensation for content from large digital platforms” over the past decade and has “entered a new phase of negotiations with the rise of AI.” generative”.
“It’s reassuring that prescient executives at the biggest AI companies understand that AI generation cannot be degenerative, that the recomposition of content cannot lead to the decay of creativity,” Thomson added.
The rise of artificial intelligence tools could result in greater scrutiny for Big Tech giants like Meta and Google, which already face a growing campaign to pay media outlets for their content. In 2021, Australia passed a law requiring technology companies to negotiate content deals with publishers.
That same year, News Corp reached a landmark deal in which it agreed to provide content from its news sites to Google in exchange for “significant payments” from the tech giant.
Tech companies have rejected similar laws, including one that recently went into effect in Canada and other proposals in California and on Capitol Hill.
In September, Thomson highlighted signs of left-wing bias present in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other chatbots, describing their tendency to spit out nonsensical responses as “garbage in, garbage out, garbage everywhere.”
Months earlier, Thomson warned that the rise of AI could “fatally undermine” journalism. He expressed particular concern that the intellectual property of News Corp brands is “being harvested and disposed of” to train AI models.
