How Damaging Are AI News Summaries to Publishers?

As AI companies hoover up troves of content across the internet, search traffic is positioned as the next front in the tug-of-war between publishers and Big Tech. Media organizations are pushing to shape the tools that create AI-generated summaries of their news stories, sometimes without attribution or citation, allowing users to bypass their articles.

The New York Times has sent generative AI startup Perplexity, backed by Jeff Bezos and YouTube’s ex-chief executive, a cease and desist for copying its articles and using them to create summaries of articles. The publisher says the practice constitutes “egregious and ongoing violations” of its intellectual property rights since the answers are “substitutive of our protected works.”

So far, most battles in the AI world have largely revolved around the use of copyrighted content to train large language models, the systems that power ChatGPT and other chatbots. But publishers also take issue with AI firms ripping off their reporting in response to search queries.

This has played a part in prompting media organizations to ink deals with OpenAI and other AI firms, including Perplexity. A major component of these agreements, which could also feature much-needed financial windfalls amid a declining media landscape, is citations and direct links to content from publishers used to answer queries. In a recent deal between the Sam Altman-led firm and Hearst, OpenAI said that this will provide “transparency and easy access to the original” sources.

In a statement, Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella said the partnership will “help us evolve the future of magazine content.” She added, “This collaboration ensures that our high-quality writing and expertise, cultural and historical context and attribution and credibility are promoted as OpenAI’s products evolve.”

Publishers that’ve reached similar arrangements with OpenAI include Axel Springer, owner of Politico and Business Insider; News Corp.; The Associated Press; the Financial Times; Vox Media; and The Atlantic. Hearst Newspapers president Jeff Johnson stressed the synergy in these types of deals in manufacturing “more timely and relevant results.”

The legal waters are muddy. Under intellectual property laws, facts aren’t copyrightable. It’s the arrangement and composition of facts that are protected. This means that journalists are free to report common details without concern of infringement as long as they aren’t copying excerpts word-for-word. That principle is among the reasons that the Times may face an uphill battle in its lawsuit against OpenAI, though the production of evidence of ChatGPT generating verbatim responses of its articles may get it over the hump. Fair use, which allows for works to be utilized in certain circumstances without a license, will be a key battleground.

In May, a major trade group representing the news industry urged lawmakers to intervene in Google’s expansion of AI Overviews, which combines answers generated from AI systems alongside snippets of text from linked websites. The tool “will further entrench Google’s monopoly power while starving digital publishers of monetization opportunities to fund high-quality, original content,” the letter stated.

In response to the Times‘ letter, Perplexity maintained in a statement that it’s on solid legal footing. “The law recognizes that no one organization owns the copyright over facts,” it said. “This is what allows us to have a rich and open information ecosystem, not to mention, it gives news organizations the ability to report on topics that were previously covered by another news outlet.”

This isn’t Perplexity’s first time rankling a publisher. Earlier this year, Forbes threatened legal action against the AI firm for ripping off its work without attribution. The dispute related to the company publishing an AI-generated version of a story about a Forbes investigative piece on former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, followed up by an AI-generated podcast, which was then turned into a YouTube video. That video outranked Forbes‘ article on Google search. Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas told the Associated Press at the time that it’s “actually more of an aggregator of information” rather than a news outlet.

Publishers have reason to worry. More than a decade ago, the normalization of tech companies carrying content created by news organizations without directly paying them — cannibalizing readership and ad revenue — precipitated the decline of the media industry. With the rise of generative AI, those same firms threaten to further tilt the balance of power between Big Tech and news.