Opinion: Artificial Intelligence Has Already Obsoleted Canada’s Online News Law, Bill C-18

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Michael Geist is Chair of the Canadian Research Committee for Internet and Electronic Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa School of Law.

The Online News Act, a government legislative initiative that forces Google and Meta to pay hundreds of Canadian media companies to link their news content, is likely to be passed before politicians’ summer vacation later this week.

Most attention on Bill C-18 so far has centered on the response of two internet companies, both of which will block news content on their platforms if they face new financial liability for links Because it raises possibilities.

But that focus ignores an important new reality that could make the bill already obsolete. Several witnesses to the Senate committee considering the bill pointed to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and its impact on the news business. Among them are David Skok of The Logic and Phillip Crawley of Globe and Mail publisher, and links to news content on Google, the primary portal for consuming news for many. “Over the next 6-12 months, ChatGPT and generative AI are already in just 6 months.”

The Senate made some minor amendments to Bill C-18, but the resulting bill simply fails to address the burgeoning commercial, legal, and policy challenges posed by generative AI.

What you need to know about Bill C-18 that could affect Canadian news publishers

Generative AI has the potential to transform both search and news, but the not-so-secret reality of online news law is that it was written for an entirely different era. In fact, the bill works as if AI didn’t exist at all.

Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Cultural Heritage, recently confirmed that the current Bill C-18 only applies to two companies: Google and Meta. The current definition of a “digital news intermediary” includes not only prominent Internet platforms such as Twitter, Apple and TikTok, but also major AI providers such as OpenAI (which runs ChatGPT) and Microsoft (which has embedded AI in its Bing search engine). are also excluded.

As a result of this bill, these companies are not obligated to negotiate agreements with Canadian media outlets.

Even if arrested, the bill covers activities largely unrelated to the purpose of generative AI. Bill C-18 covers both reproduction of news content and “facilitating access” to news content. This includes linking, indexing, or aggregating news content. None of these activities describe a generative AI process that does not duplicate the original text, does not require links to the original source, and does not index the content in the same way as traditional search engines.

The advent of generative AI has sparked debate about the possibility of licensing news content for inclusion in large-scale language models used in AI systems. But by upending the long-standing principle of linking to online sources as part of free flow, Bill C-18 will likely alienate Internet intermediaries from Canadian news sources and prevent them from linking to original sources. So it actually moves AI companies in the opposite direction. information on the Internet.

Canada cannot afford to ignore the regulatory implications of AI. As part of the AI ​​legal landscape, we must consider the copyright and licensing implications of the large language models that are essential for generative AI.

This issue will undoubtedly provoke heated debate. While some would argue for adopting a traditional licensing approach, potential reward systems for news content take into account the limited relative value of content from particular news sources in the context of a training set of trillions of words. would need to be put in

Furthermore, the introduction of significant restrictions on the development of large-scale language models undermines Canada’s aspirations to become a global AI leader, and reliance on unreliable training data actually leads to significant bias and misinformation. may lead to

These are important AI policy issues, but they are not determined by Bill C-18.

Rather, it seems increasingly likely that the government’s online news bill will be treated as a warning of legislative hubris. If internet platforms block news in response to payment obligations for links, it could lead to millions of dollars lost in the short term, and in the long term sidetracked by a world of undesigned generative AI. It becomes meaningless.