With the increasing use of technology as a source of current events, AI-generated news will need to be labeled “nutrition” and tech companies will have to pay publishers for the content they use, according to a centre-left think tank.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said AI companies are rapidly emerging as the internet’s new “gatekeepers” and intervention is needed to create a healthy AI news environment.
It recommended that AI-generated news be given standardized labels to indicate what information was used to create the answer, such as peer-reviewed research or articles from specialized news outlets. It also called for a licensing system to be established in the UK that would allow publishers to negotiate with tech companies about the use of their content in AI News.
“If AI companies are to profit from journalism and shape what the public sees, they must be required to pay a fair price for the news they consume and to operate under clear rules that protect the pluralism, credibility, and long-term future of independent journalism,” said Roa Powell, senior researcher at IPPR and co-author of the report.
IPPR said work could begin on the granting of a license, with the UK competition regulator exercising new enforcement powers against Google. The Competition and Markets Authority this week proposed giving web publishers and news organizations more powers to stop Google from scraping summaries of their content. Collective licensing agreements will ensure a wide range of publishers are included, IPPR added.
According to the Reuters Institute for Journalism, Google’s AI Overview is currently used by 2 billion monthly users, and about a quarter of them use AI to get information.
IPPR said copyright law should remain unchanged to ensure the licensing market grows, but the government should encourage new business models for news that do not rely on the technology sector, such as supporting the BBC and local news providers.
“With the right policies in place, the government can shape this market and enable UK news organizations to move their business models into the AI era. “AI companies are increasing the credibility of their products by using trusted sources,” the report states.
IPPR tested four AI tools: ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google Gemini, and Perplexity by entering 100 news-related queries into these platforms and analyzing the more than 2,500 links generated by the AI responses.
ChatGPT and Gemini make no mention of journalism by the BBC, which blocks bots used to frame answers, while Overviews and Perplexity used BBC content despite broadcasters’ objections to tools that use journalism.
IPPR’s research found that the Telegraph, GB News, The Sun and the Daily Mail were cited in less than 4% of responses on ChatGPT, while the Guardian, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, was used as a source in nearly six out of 10 responses. The Financial Times, which has a licensing agreement with OpenAI, also featured it highly. The Guardian was also the most common source of information used by Gemini, appearing in half of all responses.
Google’s use of AI summaries at the top of search results is impacting publishers’ click-through traffic and having a knock-on effect on their revenue. This is because many users read summaries without moving on to the original journalism.
IPPR said questions need to be asked about how financial relationships between AI companies and news providers shape the answers.
“If accredited publications appear more prominently in AI responses, there is a risk that smaller and local news providers, who are less likely to win business with AI, will be squeezed out,” the report said.
IPPR added that while licensing agreements can compensate for lost advertising revenue to some extent, they cannot maintain a healthy news ecosystem. News organizations could become dependent on tech giants for revenue, which could easily disappear if copyright protections weaken, the think tank said.
IPPR said public funding should be used to help the BBC “innovate with AI”, creating new business models for investigative and local news whose sustainability could be threatened by the rise of AI news.
