Rana Foroohar rightly grounds the legal battles between The New York Times and the OpenAI/ Microsoft combine in the lessons learnt by publishers from their disintermediation by Google (Opinion, January 8). One hopes that Big Tech will also have considered the ramifications of that victory.
Two decades on, Google’s advertising-heavy search results now undermine the user experience, once key to their success. The desire to retain consumer attention, and hence advertiser revenue, has sucked much of the oxygen from the content ecosystem that their business model relies upon.
Deployment of generative artificial intelligence now threatens to starve the very creators who supply the training content needed for the technology’s models. Publishers are racing to protect their intellectual property; Elon Musk has decided to ringfence X / Twitter output to train his AI chatbot Grok. It is in no one’s interest if these models — soon to be embedded in every aspect of the internet — are not trained on the most diverse and reliable content possible.
Ultimately, OpenAI will probably accommodate The New York Times. Models legally trained on the best content will have competitive advantages — potentially including reduced model hallucination, and clients will be guaranteed protection from legal ramifications.
Should accessing publisher content become a significant cost, then financially weaker firms — such as open-source start-ups — will struggle to keep up.
Whatever happens, Big Tech wins.
Tim Gordon
Partner, Best Practice AI, London N1, UK
