• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, September 7, 2023

The AI guidelines issued by 26 publishing organizations on Wednesday may not have teeth. But they could serve as a basis for publishers trying to grapple with AI, and for governments considering laws to protect them. 

Above all, the Global Principles for Artificial Intelligence (AI) call for protection of intellectual property rights. 

“Developers, operators, and deployers of AI systems must respect intellectual property rights, which protect the rights holders’ investments in original content,” the document states. 

It adds, "These rights include all applicable copyright, ancillary rights, and other legal protections, as well as contractual restrictions or limitations imposed by rightsholders on the access to and use of their content.”

Closely tied to this is the issue of transparency. 

“AI systems should provide granular transparency to creators, rightsholders, and users,” the guidelines state. 

They continued, “It is essential that strong regulations are put in place to require developers of AI systems to keep detailed records of publisher works and associated metadata, alongside the legal basis on which they were accessed, and to make this information available to the extent necessary for publishers to enforce their rights where their content is included in training datasets.” 

Here is another issue: “Publishers are entitled to negotiate for and receive adequate remuneration for use of their IP. AI system developers, operators, and deployers should not be crawling, ingesting, or using our proprietary creative content without express authorization,” according to the new principles.

“Developers, operators, and deployers of AI systems must respect intellectual property rights, which protect the rights holders’ investments in original content,’ the document states. 

It adds, “These rights include all applicable copyright, ancillary rights, and other legal protections, as well as contractual restrictions or limitations imposed by rightsholders on the access to and use of their content.”

The paper continues, “Use of intellectual property by AI systems for training, surfacing, or synthesizing is usually expressly prohibited in online terms and conditions of the rightsholders, and not covered by pre-existing licensing agreements. 

The suggested rules also call for efficient licensing models and “copyright and ancillary rights to protect content creators and owners from the unlicensed use of their content.”

Meanwhile, major publications are taking steps to protect themselves. For instance, The New York Times changed its terms of service to forbid scraping of content for use in AI training.

The Times prohibits use of “robots, spiders, scripts, service, software or any manual or automatic device, tool, or process designed to data mine or scrape” its content. 

The new principles were issued even as publishers are rapidly embracing AI. 

“AI systems are only as good as the content they use to train them, and therefore developers of generative AI technology must recognize and compensate publishers accordingly for the tremendous value their content contributes to the development of these systems,” says Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of News/Media Alliance. 

The new principles do not appear to address use of AI to create editorial content, although they well might, given the buffoonery apparent in Gannett’s recent effort to use AI to cover high school sports. Gannett had to recheck every post, according to reports. 

But news organizations are taking a stand. 

For instance, the Guardian has issued rules stating that “AI systems should not be used to generate text or images intended to be directly inserted into published journalism outside of exceptional and specific circumstances. Any exceptional use must be explicitly approved by the relevant senior duty editor and must be clearly signaled to readers on the article itself.”

Similarly, Associated Press has prohibited use of AI to create publishable content and images for AP.