Journalists serve as crucial guardians of truth in society, holding power accountable through their work in communities. They cover local news and institutions like city halls, courthouses, school boards, and police departments, providing new information that can change hearts and minds and guide responsible government action.
The Need for a Sustainable News Ecosystem
This vital role depends on a healthy and sustainable news media ecosystem. In July 2023, shortly after Canada's Online News Act was passed, Anya Schiffrin co-wrote an op-ed warning Canadian news publishers to unite and negotiate hard for fair payments from platforms benefiting from circulating news. Since then, Google has been paying news businesses $100 million annually, while Meta has refused to pay and is blocking news content.
The AI Threat to Journalism
News organizations and their journalists are increasingly wary of the economic impact as large companies profit from their content without compensation. News sites are experiencing plummeting traffic as generative AI search replaces traditional search by news-seeking audiences. Compounding existing financial pressures, large language models (LLMs) are scraping and summarizing content without paying original sources, typically entering licensing agreements with only a handful of premium publishers in any national market, leaving many others, including all Canadian news publishers, excluded.
Problems with Current Practices
This situation creates several critical issues:
- Quality degradation: The old expression GIGO—garbage in, garbage out—applies; the quality of LLMs can only be as good as the data they are trained on.
- Revenue loss: By depriving news businesses of audience clickthroughs, AI companies are stripping creators of subscription and advertising revenue needed to reinvest in original, valuable content.
- Democracy risk: As polarization increases, high-quality, fact-based journalism—a cornerstone of democracy—is more essential than ever.
Proposed Solution: Statutory Licensing
In a new working paper, Schiffrin and colleagues argue that AI firms should automatically pay for the content they use. They note that while some firms seem comfortable with "stealing and litigating, if necessary," others might avoid further litigation by agreeing to pay for intellectual property, specifically published news content.
International Precedents and Calls for Action
Rod Sims, former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and driving force behind Australia's News Media Bargaining Code, recently argued in an op-ed that generative AI companies should be captured by news bargaining codes, given the explosion in AI use since those codes were passed. Similarly, OpenAI faces lawsuits from news publishers in the U.S., and a coalition of Canadian news publishers is suing OpenAI, highlighting the global nature of this issue.
Why Canada Must Act
The Canadian government should step in and enforce "statutory licensing" because the current compensation process—where news publishers must sue AI companies scraping their content—is slow, expensive, and unfair. This approach would ensure automatic, fair payments, supporting journalism's sustainability and preventing the "killing of the goose that lays the golden egg." By adopting this model, Canada can protect its news media ecosystem and uphold democratic values in an increasingly polarized world.
