Report From Tow Center: “Journalism Zero: How Platforms and Publishers are Navigating AI”

The report linked below was published today by the Tow Center For Digital Journalism.

Title: Journalism Zero: How Platforms and Publishers are Navigating AI

Authors: Dr Peter Brown and Klaudia Jaźwińska

Source: Tow Center For Digital Journalism/Columbia Journalism School/Columbia Journalism Review

From the Introduction to the Report:

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism has been researching the evolving relationship between platforms and publishers since 2015. Our 2019 report, “The End of an Era,” documented a period when publishers were coming to accept that the core premise of the social media era — that the future of journalism lay in targeting audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Apple News, Google, and other platforms — was wrong.

[Clip]

The launch of ChatGPT also serves as a useful — albeit rough — starting point for the (generative) AI era of the platform-publisher relationship. Generative AI intersects with journalism in a number of ways, some of which highlight key distinctions from social media. The first — as anyone who has attended a journalism-oriented conference or training session or seen a research proposal or school curriculum since late 2022 will be acutely aware — centers on the push to use generative AI tools for tasks including, but not limited to, analyzing large datasets; converting news outputs into different formats; translation; headline and summary generation; and drafting copy for emails, internal reports, or social media posts. 

The second, rather more contentious intersection — which is the central topic of this report — centers on the fact that the text data used by AI companies to train the LLMs that underpin their generative AI products includes a significant amount of published journalism. The Times, for instance, found that its content accounted for 1.2 percent of a recreated version of the dataset used to train OpenAI’s ChatGPT-2. What’s more, among the applications being developed with this scraped data are generative search products that summarize web content, such as news articles, on-platform, reducing the need for users to click through to the source material. The pitch from Perplexity, whose founders included former employees of Facebook and OpenAI, promises “instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included. There is no need to click on different links, compare answers, or endlessly dig for information.” 

[Clip]

AI companies need reliable, verified data to train and ground LLMs, and have scraped vast quantities of news content to do so. As Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, argued, “It turns out that accurate, well-written news is one of the most valuable sources for these models, which have been hoovering up humans’ intellectual output without permission.”

[Clip]

This report is a survey of the relationship between publishing companies and the technology and platform companies that by their actions and products shape the field of journalism. Outside the scope of this report are questions about the safety and ethical nature of the use of these tools in newsrooms, as well as the impact the widespread adoption of generative AI tools for both content production and consumption might have on the health of the information ecosystem.

Direct to Full Text Report 

Direct to Full Text Report (84 pages; PDF)

See Also: New Report Takes On the Future of AI and Search (Overview Article via Columbia Journalism Review)

For publishers who rely heavily on search for discovery and traffic, this shift is seismic. How AI’s impact on the search landscape will affect the distribution, presentation, and consumption of news online is a central theme of a new Tow Center report, out today, that I worked on with Dr. Peter Brown. Between May and October of last year, we interviewed several dozen representatives from the news and technology industries about AI’s impact on the relationship between platforms and publishers. They expressed some hope and a lot of trepidation. “I have concern that, as we did in the past, we might be taking some short-term steps without paying close enough attention to their long-term ramifications,” one news executive told us.

Read the Complete Article

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, News, Patrons and Users, Publishing, Reports