John Ridding, CEO of the Financial Times, told other news publishers that they “should insist on payments from AI companies because they have influence.”
His comments to the industry at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference in Copenhagen came a month after the Financial Times became the first UK news publisher to announce a licensing deal with OpenAI.
Speaking about the deal, Ridding said on Tuesday that the FT wanted to be a “first mover”, but also wanted to understand the potential use cases and impact of AI and expand its overall reach.
“Payments are important from a principled and revenue perspective, but so is the opportunity to broaden our reach and understand how users interact with AI,” Ridding said in his keynote.
“As with any digital or mobile revolution, raising the drawbridge or trying to stem the tide will not be a strategy for success.”
Ridding said this is a true “defining moment” for news publishers, but the opportunities that AI brings are as great as the risks, pointing to potential improvements to reader revenue models through, for example, greater personalization.
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He also cited the FT's award-winning investigation into German fintech company Wirecard, saying it would have been easier to sift through the “mountains of paperwork” involved with the investigation using AI tools.
Meanwhile, the FT has launched an AI-powered Q&A tool to provide “smart briefings for corporate clients” and has begun using Google Translate to translate its digital edition into 25 languages, describing this as a “powerful driver” of the FT's “global ambitions”.
But this “makes little sense” if publishers are “cut out of the loop between readers, information and therefore revenue,” he said.
He warned that disintermediation and separating publishers from readers was currently the “biggest threat” to the news industry, but that this was why the FT was “doubled down” on quality reporting and investigation.
Ridding said publishers like the FT with trustworthy, accurate human-made journalism could be in a stronger position, saying: “Despite all the hype, AI makes a lot of mistakes and is poor at forming facts.”
“And the key point is that without using trusted sources for training and, most importantly, justifying and validating your queries, you're likely to fall short even further.”
“It's not that big tech companies don't have enough money.”
Ridding quoted DMG Media's Editor Emeritus Peter Wright, who recently warned at the House of Lords inquiry into the future of news, saying that generative AI is “a dog eating its tail. If it develops in the way that AI developers want it to – which is if they just basically take all our work for no reward – it will destroy the very news content that the models are trained on.”
Ridding said: “So what does this mean? Simply put, it means that news organizations have influence and should insist on paying. And it means that it is rational and self-interested for AI platforms to pay.”
“There's no shortage of money,” he said, adding that the five biggest technology platforms, which are themselves just “a subset of AI companies,” are expected to make $80 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2024, up 30% from 2023.
In response, he said that global news media annual (not quarterly) spending is between $3 billion and $6 billion, an estimate he made using ChatGPT itself.
“So it's both wise and right that we invest some of that money in journalism to improve our service,” Ridding said.
Ridding proposed a model that could work between platforms and publishers: “The ultimate goal would be a systematic alignment of usage and revenue. Imagine what would happen if publishers had data showing how their content contributed to responses to requests? The foundations would be laid for a systematic flow of revenue to news media. The incentives for reliable and original reporting would increase. The vicious cycle of information degradation could be reversed.”
“This is not just a pipe dream. Entrepreneurs and engineers are working on systemic solutions like this. I wish them the best of luck.”
“For regulators and policymakers, this could be exactly what's been missing in recent years of tech-media tensions: a pro-consumer, market-based solution that provides the incentives for platforms and publishers to work together to produce trustworthy news.”
“But regulators and policymakers cannot sit back and wait for things to work out. They need to step up and protect intellectual property now. They should require publishers to pay when their journalism is used for training and education.”
Publishers can “have a happy ending”
Speaking to an audience of global news CEOs and executives, Ridding also said that taking a short-term view at this point “is not the path to success or survival”.
“The biggest challenge is planning and investing through cycles,” he said. “The massive changes we're all facing can't be overcome on a quarterly cadence. It's hard to take a long-term view when the floors and walls are all moving at the same time.”
He acknowledged that the FT is “fortunate” to be owned by the Nikkei Shimbun, a private Japanese company that “puts mission maximization over profit maximization and supports a long-term perspective”.
Ridding later added: “The bottom line is that I'm not so naive as to claim that a new contract between platforms and publishers providing structured payments for training and infrastructure will solve all the problems of the information ecosystem.
“The threat of deepfakes [and] Optimizing for social media attention is another deep-rooted problem, and whack-a-mole policing by the platforms simply isn't enough to stem the toxic tide…
“But what I am proposing is that news media and technology work together on accessing and paying for trusted original journalism, and effectively linking to that journalism, will enable quality news media to maintain its vital role and take center stage,” he said, adding: “This is necessary to avoid a cycle of decline and disaster for publishers, platforms, politics and the public alike.”
“This long-running drama in the news media could have a better ending, even a happy ending, if the main players now play their parts properly.”
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