New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned that AI companies were making choices that could lead to “a great deal of unnecessary harm” to the news business and the public’s access to reliable sources, in a speech delivered during the World News Media Congress in France on Monday.
Companies leading the development of generative-AI systems — including OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and Google — are “failing to embrace a core responsibility” of their control over the data fueling the technology’s development, Sulzberger said: making sure the public has access to “trustworthy” news. He pinned the cause on the companies’ “hijacking” of the public’s attention, spurred by the content they’ve trained their large language models on, including news articles. Such training has led multiple news organizations, including the Times itself, to sue companies such as OpenAI and Perplexity for copyright infringement.
“I fear we are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting — going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful,” Sulzberger said. “A future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy — the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism — continues to dry up.”
He called on other news organizations to speak out on the technology’s impact on the industry, which has already been battered by declining advertising revenue and a reduction in search traffic largely due to AI-generated summaries. Such industry peers, he said, have been “too quiet, too passive and too fragmented” by the “abuses” of the AI wave.
“We cannot allow AI cheerleaders to dominate the public conversation without interjecting to argue for the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for original journalism,” Sulzberger said. “We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.”
The Times was the first major news organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over the technology with its 2023 lawsuit, kickstarting a wave of litigation brought by news companies against generative AI startups. The newsroom has since struck a content-licensing deal with Amazon, and it has unveiled its principles for how its legion of journalists should engage with the technology. Its newsroom union this year has made AI a focal point of its ongoing contract negotiations.
Sulzberger said Monday that the Times wasn’t opposed to AI technology in all instances, and that he wants to use it to make the paper’s processes more efficient. “Holding a powerful new technology at arms length is a recipe for failure,” he said.
“I fully believe AI has the power to do a great deal of good in the world,” he said. “I’m not calling AI — or the tech giants that control this technology — inherently bad or evil. I’m warning that AI companies are making choices that violate settled law, threaten the viability of creative work, and appear likely to cause a great deal of unnecessary harm.”
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