Several humans touched today’s newsletter before you read it. A reporter (that’s me) ran down and wrote up the facts. Two editors helped shape and polish the draft. And a third formatted it for your screen and gave it one last scan before hitting publish. Producing the news is still a human-centric business, despite recent and widespread job losses, but that’s changing with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence. For several years now, AI has been able to generate entire articles faster than a human journalist ever could. It can summarize government meetings, sports games and crime reports almost instantly. It can even, as one news outlet is attempting, spawn fake TV anchors. There have been some embarrassing mistakes, and most mainstream news organizations are being cautious — but given its sheer speed and scalability, AI is already a shadow hanging over human reporters and editors. A different kind of worry is gripping media owners and businesspeople, who are starting to see AI as a force that could gut their fragile business model even faster than the Web or social media did — delivering fast news summaries to readers who never have to click on, or pay for, the underlying journalism. The resulting fear about the future is already pushing news publishers and tech platforms into court battles and committee hearings focused on a question with existential impact for both sides of this argument: Should AI companies pay to use the news? “The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Jim Albrecht, a former senior director of news ecosystem products at Google wrote in The Washington Post this week. “On one side of the conflict sits existential risk for the publishing industry; on the other, existential risk for technological innovation.” This fight has its roots in the Web 2.0 era. As platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter became dominant news distributors, zapping publishers’ revenue in the process, the news media has lobbied for laws that force them to pay for journalism. Some of those have passed; many others have not. And none of them has saved journalism. Publishers now worry that generative AI will make matters even worse — once again, a technology piggybacking on their work that pulls readers away from it. Unlike social media, AI isn’t a platform to share existing articles and videos. It literally trains on media content, and then regurgitates that information into content of its own. “These outputs compete in the same market, with the same audience, serving the same purpose as the original articles that feed the algorithms in the first place,” Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of News/Media Alliance, testified in the Senate last month. So, what’s to be done? Some newsrooms are forming partnerships with AI developers. (POLITICO parent company Axel Springer has one with OpenAI, for instance.) Others are girding for battle, blocking bots from using their material and suing to defend their copyrighted work, most notably the New York Times. This might actually be short-sighted, argues Marc Lavallee, director of technology product and strategy for the Knight Foundation’s journalism program. Lavallee sees AI as a key part of the foundation’s strategy to revitalize newsrooms, particularly small and local publications, by helping them to produce more journalism while keeping humans in the mix. Because AI might be helpful, as well as damaging, he contends that simply demanding payment from AI developers puts the news industry in a “dangerous position.” In an interview on today’s episode of the POLITICO Tech podcast, Lavallee points out that news organizations are also part of an ecosystem that depends on the flow of information, which they restrict at their peril: “This idea that news organizations are owed by everybody else for every single way that things were used, when they in turn build value off of fair use… feels like just a tricky, reductive approach,” he said. Listen to the full interview and subscribe to POLITICO Tech on Apple, Spotify or Simplecast. Lavallee previously spent a decade at the New York Times and oversaw the team tasked with applying emerging technologies to journalism. He suggests that news organizations should take a breath, and first learn what consumers actually want from journalism in the AI era. Only then can they fully understand the value that journalism brings to the technology -- and the ways the technology will improve journalism. That could include bots that help readers go deeper on current events, or generative tools that quickly deliver the same reporting in multiple formats. He sees “tremendous upside potential” for news organizations and their audiences alike. “We don't have a great model for what that looks like yet,” he added. “I think it's going to take a handful of specific examples happening over the next year or two for us to even start to see what that looks like.” In the meantime, Lavallee acknowledges things will be messy. The technology is likely to further hammer journalism jobs, and there will be more legal and legislative wrangling. But in the end, he predicts humans will remain central to journalism. “We will see organizations do the worst of what our fears are here, of laying off humans and replacing them with little content-generating garbage bots,” he said. “My hope is that the market for that is going to wane, because the same sort of underlying enabling technologies, used in the right hands, ultimately with humans involved, ultimately makes for a better, more relevant product.” | 
