Irish news publishers face a “significant threat” from artificial intelligence (AI), the Oireachtas Committee on AI will hold a hearing on Tuesday.
Newsbrands, an organization of national news publishers, told the committee that “the harvest is [of] An opening statement obtained by The Irish Times said “independent reporting to feed LLMs” posed an “existential threat” to the financial security of quality journalism. LLMs (Large-Scale Language Models) are designed to understand, process, and produce human-like text.
“Irish publishers are currently under grave threat, and as a result, so is truth and democracy,” Sammy Burke, chairman of Newsbrands Ireland, is expected to say.
Newsbrands will appear before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Tuesday, along with representatives from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Media Literacy Ireland.
Mr Burke will tell Oireachtas members that the meeting is “timely” and that “the actions and decisions taken now will determine whether AI strengthens our democratic institutions or quietly destroys them.”
The committee will hear that news publishers are being undermined by “major technology platforms, AI and changing audience habits” and that generative AI has been trained on copyrighted journalism.
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“Gen AI is powered by journalism that refuses to be paid for. By harvesting original reporting to feed LLMs, the economic viability of quality journalism is under existential threat,” Burke attempts to state.
She will warn that if journalism becomes economically unsustainable, the impact will be “less scrutiny of power, greater exposure to misinformation and disinformation, and less public trust in democratic institutions.”
In its opening statement, the group, which represents national news publishers such as the Irish Times, Business Post and Irish Farmers Journal, said it had received “little support from government to claim ownership of original content” and called for funding to “drive innovation in a broader sense while maintaining independence”.
In NUJ’s opening statement, Deputy Secretary-General Seamus Dooley will tell the committee that “AI is not an immediate threat and is present across industries.”
He will say that “false attribution, inaccurate AI-generated articles, and creators discovering their work has been used without consent or compensation” are already happening, which “undermines public trust in journalism and puts at risk the reputations of all journalists and media organizations seeking to uphold ethical standards.”
Dooley will call for “fair and reasonable compensation terms” for journalists and creators whose work has been used without permission by AI companies, as well as a licensing system for the use of their works.
“Technology companies should be obligated to disclose their training data, algorithmic designs, and deliverables, and should pay a corresponding price for stealing the labor of creative workers at scale.”
Mr Dooley will represent NUJ at the committee meeting, as well as Gerald Cunningham, chairman of NUJ’s Dublin Freelance branch. NewsBrands will be represented by Mr Burke of the Irish Farmers Journal and Deirdre Beldon, vice chair of the Irish Times Group. Eileen Cullotty and Martina Chapman will represent Media Literacy Ireland.
NUJ and NewsBrands confirmed the authenticity of the opening statement.
