• by Ray Schultz , April 20, 2023

The News/Media Alliance, an advocacy group that represents over 2,000 print and digital publishing companies, has developed a set of AI Principles to provide guidance for use of journalistic and creative content by generative artificial intelligence (GAI) systems.  

The Principles cover issues related to intellectual property rights, transparency, accountability, fairness, safety, and design They apply to all content, including text, images, audiovisual and all other formats.

“The Principles emphasize that emerging technologies such as AI must continue to respect publishers’ intellectual property (IP), brands, reader relationships, and investments made in creating quality journalistic and creative content,” says Danielle Coffey. executive vice president and general counsel of the News Media Alliance. 

Coffey adds, “Publishers must be fairly compensated for the tremendous value their content contributes to the development of generative AI technology. It’s a simple exchange of value.” 

The Principles stipulate that GAI developers and deployers must negotiate with publishers for the right to use their content, including:

• Training content—This includes use of publishers’ content in datasets for use in GAI system training and testing. 
• Surfacing—Any serving of publishers’ content in response to user inputs and search queries..
• Synthesizing—This covers summaries, explanations, analyses etc. of source content in response to a query. 

The Alliance also demands passage of the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA). This would allow publishers to negotiate collectively with the Big Tech platforms for fair compensation for use of their content. This would include AI usage.  

Coffey argues that the tech platforms “clearly cannot be trusted to self-regulate and instead, are increasing their anticompetitive behavior to the detriment of local journalism.”