The news thieves

As if the future of local news wasn’t in enough doubt in recent years, the dawn of artificial intelligence appears poised to crush the life out of it altogether.
While larger news organizations are now fighting this latest, and potentially fatal, development in courtrooms across the country, smaller independent news entities, like the Timberjay, can hardly afford to undertake legal action against companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
At issue is the use of AI summaries, or overviews, that have now become a primary fixture of search engines like Google. In the past, search engines would typically direct inquiries on a subject to a relevant online source. If someone searched for the latest action by the Tower City Council, for example, Google would typically direct a user to a recent Timberjay news story on the city council.
In that sense, Google was providing a value to a news or information site by sending interested web traffic their way.
On the web, traffic is an important metric, one that typically translates into revenue. But the number of eyeballs that used to go to millions of websites as recently as 2023 have been reduced, in some cases dramatically.
It’s been reported that some larger information and news sites have seen their web traffic decline by as much as 95 percent in just the past year and a half.
While most haven’t seen such dramatic declines, few have emerged from the situation unscathed.
That’s because, rather than sending interested readers to the sites with the information they’re looking for, companies like Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity are hijacking those readers by pirating the information from the original sources and offering up AI-generated summaries instead. This means websites that are often shelling out big money to generate original, copyrighted content are losing the value of that content as AI summaries repackage it and serve it up directly to users, without the redirect to their site that used to be part of the deal. That means less revenue opportunity for the advertising sold on their websites, or subscriptions to access the information.
Even though many of the sites in question have paywalls, the AI bots that constantly crawl the web for information can assemble protected content in a variety of ways, sometimes getting past paywalls or at times finding excerpts that have been posted elsewhere to the web.
There are websites out there that intentionally steal copyrighted material, often based in other countries that don’t enforce foreign copyright laws, which can provide a source for the AI summaries.
We know this is happening, because we’ve found a huge amount of our own copyrighted work, republished free and in-full, on some of these criminal sites.
Such developments pose enormous challenges for the future sustainability of small, independent news organizations. For years, the newspaper industry, which offers the only source of credible news in thousands of small communities across the country, had hopes that they could eventually transition to an all-digital format.
While that economic model has been a work in progress for more than a decade, some news organizations had successfully made the transition.
Yet, if AI is allowed to steal the content from online news sources, without compensating the creators of that content, this transition becomes all the more difficult for media organizations.
So, what can we do? First, talk to your legislators and urge them to adopt new laws that restrict this kind of behavior, or that require that companies like Google compensate news organizations for repackaging their copyrighted material as AI summaries.
And while you’re at it, urge them to abandon efforts to provide hefty tax breaks to encourage big tech companies to locate their gigantic data centers here in Minnesota.
Most residents don’t want these centers anywhere near them. And it’s particularly galling for lawmakers to offer tax breaks for the very same companies that are harming every newspaper in the state by pirating their news for their own financial benefit.
AI doesn’t have to be the end of the news industry. It’s a tool and it could, if used properly, help small news organizations utilize their staff more productively. A reporter, for example, could spend an entire day reading a 200-page report for a story or have an AI program identify the key points in 90 seconds.
How AI is developed should be a decision for society and our political process. We can’t accept a world where such critical decisions about the future are made by a handful of billionaires looking out solely for their own interests. When election time comes around, let’s make sure those representing us are willing to fight the forces of big money, and make sure that AI works to benefit all of us.