• by Ray Schultz , April 12, 2023

Media magnate Barry Diller let fly earlier this week, telling publishers they should sue to stop AI engines from stealing their content. 

'If all the world's information is able to be sucked up in this maw and then essentially repackaged...there will be no publishing, it is not possible,' Diller said during the Semafor Media Summit, according to reports. 

He added, ““Companies can absolutely sue under copyright law.”

Diller, who is founder and chairman of the  IAC, publisher of many digital sites, compared today’s situation with the start of the Internet, when everything was free. 

“I think that today is a potentially analogous to that, which is if publishers do not say 'you cannot scrape our content, you cannot take it' -- you cannot take it transformatively, to get to the key word in fair use, but you cannot take it and use it in real time to actually cannibalize everything,' he said, according to the Daily Mail. 

He added, 'And if you think that won't happen, I think you're just being a fool.”

Meanwhile, publishers have been discussing how their content is being used to train AI tools, and how they should be compensated. 

Last month, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and John Kennedy (R-Louisiana),  introduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that  would allow news publishers and broadcasters to jointly negotiate with large online platforms including Google and Facebook.

That presumably could include chatbot providers. 

he which supports the bill, also pointed to the recent growth of artificial intelligence tools.

Danielle Coffey, executive vice president and general counsel of the News/Media Alliance,  stated that emerging artificial intelligence technologies show a need for compensation, adding that “content creators may soon see even less return than what they receive today.”

She added, “We must ensure that the digital ecosystem returns value back to the people who deliver high-quality journalism we all rely on around the world,.”