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BUZZMACHINE

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine
covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

REFLECTIONS IN THE ‘WOKE’ MIRROR

February 24, 2024 | No Comments

Regarding the supposed furor over #WokeGemini…

If we saw generative AI as a creative tool, then I’d say imagining the founding
of America with women & Black people at the table and the Catholic Church headed
by Black women and Native Americans is a proper revision of history the way it
should have been.

The reaction to #WokeGemini says more about society than the tool itself; that’s
what fascinates me about AI: its reflections. Right-wing columnists fear the
anti-white machine programmed by commisars of what we used to call political
correctness.

And the extremist Murdoch media and pols hunt for enemies: technologists who
dare to recognize “white privilege.” Their strategy of projection works in media
today: calling anti-racism racism to deflect from their deep racism, just as
calling Biden old and doddering deflects from the truly doddering Trump. In
today’s credulous media, it works.

Ultimately, this little episode shows the folly of “guardrails” in AI, for a
tool can be made to do anything and what it is proscribed from doing — and
reaction to that — can be more revealing and risky than the tool alone. It is
like telling Gutenberg what movable type must never say. The Church tried to do
just that with his successors as, at first, the technology was held responsible
for what it produced: printers were beheaded and behanded for what their
machines produced. Then booksellers were held liable and controlled via
licensing and the Stationers Company in Britain. Finally, authors were the
responsible parties — and Foucault says that is the birth of the author.

We debate responsibility over the technology of AI today: Some want the model
makers to be responsible for everything that could (or now could not) be
produced from their machine. Some try to blame an application of the model
(looking at you, Air Canada). Some want to blame the technology for making just
what it was asked to make (looking at a certain lawyer and a certain reporter).

The episode also reveals the fraud in associating generative AI with truth. If
it were seen instead as a concordance of all society’s biased text and images
and a creative tool that can be told to remake that, then there’d be no story
here, only interesting reflections of ourselves, our aspirations, our faults,
and our fears.

IS IT TIME TO GIVE UP ON OLD NEWS?

January 24, 2024 | 7 Comments
jcpa, journalism, News, newspapers, scranton

I am coming to a conclusion I have avoided for my last three decades working on
the internet and news: It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and
its legacy industry.

I say this with no joy, no satisfaction at having tried to get newspapers and
magazines to change, and much empathy for the journalists and others caught
working in a dying sector and those who count on them. But the old news industry
is gasping for air. I’m not suggesting performing euthenasia on what is left.
Nor do I dance on the grave. In my time running a Center for Entrepreneurial
Journalism, now ending, I have tried to balance support for startups and legacy
companies. But I wonder whether it is time stop throwing good money and effort
after bad.

The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of
their would-be saviors — from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to
consolidation to billionnaires — has failed them. Hedge funds have bought up
chains and papers, selling everything not bolted down, cutting every possible
cost, and taking every penny of cash flow home with them. The one thing the old
companies are still investing in is lobbying.

In my testimony in the Senate last week, I engaged in the wishful if futile act
of urging the legislators not to enact protectionist legislation written with
the industry lobbyists who sat beside me, but instead to support the emergent
reinvention of journalism occurring in communities everywhere. Not likely.

The bad news for news is constant. Just in the last month, the Los Angeles Times
is laying off 115 people, throwing its newsroom into “chaos” and “mayhem.” Time
magazine lays off 15 percent of its unionized editorial staff. Meanwhile, The
New York Times chronicles the pains of billionnaires losing fortunes trying to
save old news. I didn’t think it was possible for hedge funds to torture
journalism more, but Alden just did something even worse than buying a paper:
selling The Baltimore Sun to the mini-Murdoch, David Smith, chair of right-wing
Sinclair, hater of news and newspapers. In the UK, the Mirror’s circulation has
fallen from 5 million to a quarter million, its local papers are sputtering, and
the company predicts print will be unsustainble — something I’ve been warning
about for two decades. Once-grand Sports Illustrated is being murdered in plain
sight. The FCC just announced it is trying to support local TV news, nevermind
that audience for local broadcast news is small, old, and dying … and more and
more made up of people watching the faux Fox, Sinclair.

Meanwhile, trust in journalism falls to ever-lower records. The Reuters
Institute at Oxford tells us that a third of people actively avoid news, and who
can blame them? I myself am fed up with old news’ wishful doomsaying, its
credulous coverage of politics as sport, its bothsidesing and normalization of
the rise of populist fascism, its refusal to call racism racism, its chronic
lack of diversity, its dependence on access to power, its moral panic about
technology, and the resource it wastes on copying and clickbait. Semafor and
Gallup report that trust in journalists is falling now among Democrats, too.

And now here comes artificial intelligence to manufacture and devalue that thing
we call content, robbing the old news industry of its sense of value and purpose
in making the commodity. I’ve been trying to convince news organizations that
they are not, or should not be, in content business, but that journalism is
instead a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration. I have
failed.

Of course, there are exceptions. The Boston Globe and StarTribune seem to be
surviving or better. My old colleagues at Advance are innovating in Alabama,
living on past print. (In his lengthy lamentation on death in news, Ezra Klein
lists Alabama going out of print as a loss when I say it is a victory: life
after the death of the press.) The Times is growing on the backs of games and
food. The National Trust for Local News is saving papers here and there.

But then there’s Scranton, its paper now in the clutches of Alden. The
Washington Post has chroncled their pain. On Feb. 9, I’ll be speaking at the
University of Scranton’s Schemel Forum about what to do now. What should I tell
them?

I will warn them to expect cutbacks and no investment or innovation at their
dear old Times-Tribune. I’ve seen how Alden operates. As a member of a Digital
First advisory board a decade ago, I saw the company innovate under John Paton
and Jim Brady, but when that didn’t yield a sale in 2015, both of them left and
the hedgies proceeded to cut to the marrow.

I come with no solution, no salvation; nothing’s that simple. There are many
examples of people trying to find new futures for news. In my Senate testimony,
I spoke of the 450 members of the New Jersey News Commons, which I’m proud to
have helped start a decade ago at Montclair State University; and the 475
members of LION, the Local Independent Online News Publishers; and the 425
members of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. See also today’s news that The
19th is starting a new network for sharing news (something I tried in New Jersey
years ago). This is where innovation in news is occurring: bottom-up,
grass-roots efforts emergent in communities.

But as my old friend and colleague Peter Bhatia said when he made the
controversial decision of dismissing the editor of the new Houston Landing,
“We’re basically putting out a newspaper on the web. And that’s not a recipe for
success for us for the long term, nor is it a recipe for sustainability.” I
don’t know Houston Landing well enough to comment but I do worry that some of
the efforts at new news still emulate and aspire to the form and function of old
news.

I think we need to be more radical than that, much more radical than I have
been.

I say we must fundamentally reimagine journalism and its role in a society under
threat of authoritarian, anti-Enlightenment, fascist takeover. I recently wrote
about a journalism of belonging. With my colleague Carrie Brown, I helped start
a degree program — a movement carried on by our alums — in Engagement
Journalism. There are other movements seeking to remake journalism: Solutions
Journalism, Collaborative Journalism, Constructive Journalism, Reparative
Journalism, Dialog Journalism, Deliberative Journalism, Solidarity Journalism,
Entrepreneurial Journalism, and more. What they share is an ethic of first
listening to communities and their needs and an urgency to innovate.

I note with optimism Mike Masnick’s just released report, The Sky is Rising,
about the impact of the internet on media writ large — reading, watching,
listening, and playing. It concludes, “More creative content is being produced
that ever before. More people are able to create content than ever before, and
more people are able to make money doing so…. And almost all of this is thanks
to the power of the internet.” The report is talking mostly about entertainment
but also notes that according to Census Bureau data, “it appears that internet
publishing jobs more than replaced the jobs lost in newspapers and
periodicals.”

There can be life after legacy. There will be roles for journalists. But
journalism schools must expand their horizon to teach more than making content.
How do we serve many publics in a networked world?

For the last two decades at least, I have told newspaper editors and publishers
that they must imagine a day when print is no longer sustainable, and if they
are not profitable digitally by then, they will die. Now I will tell the good
people of Scranton to imagine a day when their paper dies, or is as good as
dead.

What then? Citizens will have to come together to understand their needs as a
community: for information, yes, and also for understanding, collaboration,
accountability, repair, and service. They will need to decide what is best for
Scranton and its many communities.

They might find some help, though never enough. Press Forward is bringing $500
million to the effort, but that can stretch only so far. The New Jersey Civic
Information Consortium is doing interesting work granting state funds to bolster
innovation. Perhaps Pennsylvania could do likewise. (Though I worry about what
equivalent efforts in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma would support.) California,
like the US Congress with its JCPA, are talking about helping news — but what
they’re actually doing is looking to blackmail tech companies on behalf of
legacy news companies and their hedge-fund owners. JCPA specifically excludes
news enterprises making less than $100,000 — which is to say most of those
hundreds of innovators I listed above. No thank you.

The way out of this will be to educate and empower our next generation, not in
so-called media literacy, but in media leadership, in taking responsibility for
the health of their communities and their public discourse. That is a big,
complex, nuanced, unsure order that will require marshalling the wisdom of
disciplines far beyond journalism: history, anthropology, sociology, psychology,
community studies, ethics, design, and the arts.

I am afraid to say that the newspaper and TV and commercial radio station of
today are inadequate to the task. Their news was invented in the long century of
mass media, which began (as I recount in Magazine) when Frank Munsey realized he
could sell his eponymous periodical at a dime and a loss, but profit by selling
his audience’s attention to advertisers. Thus was born the attention economy
that now corrupts not only old media but new. The internet isn’t killing news.
It is killing the mass and the myth that kept media alive all these years: that
our attention is a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold.

I say this with reluctance and sadness but also with hope, for I am priviliged
to watch some of my alumni try to create a new journalism at human scale, built
on listening and serving communities, not nostalgia. How might Scranton do that?
That will be up to Scranton, not to the heartless hedge fund — the
Dunder-Mifflin of newspapering — that has come to town.

MAKE BELL LABS AN INTERNET MUSEUM

January 18, 2024 | 1 Comment
bell labs, Internet, museums

> I wrote an op-ed for NJ.com and the Star-Ledger in New Jersey proposing that
> the soon-empty Bell Labs should become a Museum and School of the Internet.
> Here, for those outside the Garden State, is the text:

Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our
digital age, is closing in Murray Hill, its latest owners moving to more modern
headquarters in New Brunswick. The Labs should be preserved as a historic site
and more. I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and
school of the internet.

The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs:
the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites,
fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression,
microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence — not
to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including
the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the
Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World’s Fair.

There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History
Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts
boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet
and you’ll find amusing digital artifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and
study this immensely impactful institution in society.

Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not
only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications
empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell?

I remember taking a field trip to Bell Labs soon after this web site, NJ.com,
started in 1995. I was an executive of NJ.com’s parent company, Advance. My
fellow editors and I felt we were on the sharp edge of the future in bringing
news online.

We thought that earned us kinship with the invention of that future that went on
at Bell Labs, so we arranged a visit to the awe-inspiring building designed by
Stephen F. Voorhees and opened in 1941. The halls were haunted with genius: lab
after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that
history.

We also must not lose the history of the internet as it passes us by in present
tense. In researching my book, “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and
its Lessons for the Age of the Internet,” I was shocked to discover that there
was not a discipline devoted to studying the history and influence of print and
the book until Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote her seminal work, “The Printing Press
as an Agent of Change,” in 1979, a half-millennium after Gutenberg. We must not
wait so long to preserve memories and study the importance of the net in our
lives.

The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the
advances that led to the internet. It could be a school. After leaving Advance
in 2006, I became a journalism professor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism,
from which I am retiring.

I am less interested now in studying journalism than in the greater,
all-enveloping subject: the internet. My dream is to start a new educational
program in Internet Studies, to bring the humanities and social sciences to
research the internet, for it is much more than a technology; it is a human
network that reflects both human accomplishment and human failure.

Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many
disciplines — technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology,
history, ethics, economics, community studies, design — could gather to teach
and learn, discuss and research.

Imagine, too, if a New Jersey university could use the space for classes and
events.

There is a model for this in New Jersey in what Montclair State University is
doing in Paterson, developing and operating a museum devoted to the history of
Negro League baseball in the historic Hinchcliffe Stadium. This is the kind of
university-community collaboration that could enrich the space of Bell Labs with
energy and life.

There is some delicious irony in proposing that the internet be memorialized in
what was once an AT&T facility, for the old telephone company resisted the
arrival of the internet, hoping we would pay by the minute for long-distance
calls forever.

In 1997, David Isenberg, a 12-year veteran of Bell Labs, wrote an infamous memo
telling his bosses they were wrong to build intelligent networks and should
instead learn the value of the stupid network that anyone could connect to: the
internet.

Isenberg’s web site says the memo “was received with acclaim everywhere in the
global telecommunications community with one exception — at AT&T itself! So
Isenberg left AT&T in 1998.”

How wonderful if, in the end, Bell Labs could claim to become a forever home for
that network that has changed the world.

IN THE ECHO CHAMBER

January 11, 2024 | 1 Comment
ai, artificial intelligence, congress, copyright, journalism

Well, that was surreal. I testified in a hearing about AI and the future of
journalism held by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and
the Law. Here is my written testimony and here’s the Reader’s Digest version in
my opening remarks:

It was a privilege and honor to be invited to air my views on technology and the
news. I went in knowing I had a role to play, as the odd man out. The other
witnesses were lobbyists for the newspaper/magazine and broadcast industries and
the CEO of a major magazine company. The staff knew I would present an
alternative perspective. My fellow panelists noted before we sat
down — nicely — that they disagreed with my written testimony. Job done. There
was little opportunity to disagree in the hearing, for one speaks only when
spoken to.

What struck me about the experience is not surprising: They call the internet an
echo chamber. But, of course, there’s no greater echo chamber than Congress:
lobbyists and legislators agreeing with each other about the laws they write and
promote together. That’s what I witnessed in the hearing in a few key areas:

Licensing: The industry people and the politicians all took as gospel the idea
that AI companies should have to license and pay for every bit of media content
they use.

I disagree. I draw the analogy to what happened when radio started. Newspapers
tried everything to keep radio out of news. In the end, to this day, radio rips
and reads newspapers, taking in and repurposing information. That’s to the
benefit of an informed society.

Why shouldn’t AI have the same right? I ask. Some have objected to my metaphor:
Yes, I know, AI is a program and the machine doesn’t read or learn or have
rights any more than a broadcast tower can listen and speak and vote. I spoke
metaphorically, for if I had instead argued that, say, Google or Meta has a
right to read and learn, that would have opened up a whole can of PR worms. The
point is obvious, though: If AI creators would be required by law to license
*everything* they use, that grants them lesser rights than media — including
journalists, who, let’s be clear, read, learn from, and repurpose information
from each other and from sources every day.

I think there’s a difference in using content to train a model versus producing
output. It’s one matter for large language models to be taught the relationship
of, say, the words “White” and “House.” I say that is fair and transformative
use. But it’s a fair discussion to separate out questions of proper acquisition
and terms of use when an application quotes from copyrighted material from
behind a paywall in its output. The magazine executive cleverly conflated
training and output, saying *any* use required licensing and payment. I believe
that sets a dangerous precedent for news media itself.

If licensing and payment is required for all use of all content, then I say the
doctrine of fair use could be eviscerated. The senators argued just the
opposite, saying that if fair use is expanded, copyright becomes meaningless. We
disagree.

JCPA: The so-called Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is a darling of
many members of the committee. Like Canada’s disastrous Bill C-18 and
Australia’s corrupt News Media Bargaining Code — which the senators and the
lobbyists think are wonderful — the JCPA would allow large news organizations
(those that earn more than $100,000 a year, leaving out countless small, local
enterprises) to sidestep antitrust and gang together and force platforms to
“negotiate” for the right to link to their content. It’s legislated blackmail. I
didn’t have the chance to say that. Instead, the lobbyists and legislators all
agreed how much they love the bill and can’t wait to try again to pass it.

Section 230: Members of the committee also want to pass legislation to exclude
generative AI from the protections of Section 230, which enables public
discourse online by protecting platforms from liability for what users say there
while also allowing companies to moderate what is said. The chair said no
witness in this series of hearings on AI has disagreed. I had the opportunity to
say that he has found his first disagreement.

I always worry about attempts to slice away Section 230’s protections like a
deli balogna. But more to the point, I tried to explain that there is nuance in
deciding where liability should lie. In the beginning of print, printers were
held liable — burned, beheaded, and behanded — for what came off their presses;
then booksellers were responsible for what they sold; until ultimately authors
were held responsible — which, some say, was the birth of the idea of
authorship.

When I attended a World Economic Forum AI governance summit, there was much
discussion about these questions in relation to AI. Holding the models liable
for everything that could be done with them would, in my view, be like blaming
the printing press for what is put on and what comes off it. At the event, some
said responsibility should lie at the application level. That could be true if,
for example, Michael Cohen was misled by Google when it placed Bard next to
search, letting him believe it would act like search and giving him bogus case
citations instead. I would say that responsiblity generally lies with the user,
the person who instructs the program to say something bad or who uses the
program’s output without checking it, as Cohen did. There is nuance.

Deep fakery: There was also some discussion of the machine being used to fool
people and whether, in the example used, Meta should be held responsible and
expected to verify and take down a fake video of someone made with AI — or else
be sued. As ever, I caution against legislating official truth.

The most amusing moment in the hearing was when the senator from Tennessee
complained that media are liberal and AI is liberal and for proof she said that
if one asks ChatGPT to write a poem praising Donald Trump, it will refuse. But
it would write a poem praising Joe Biden and she proceeded to read it to me. I
said it was bad poetry. (BTW, she’s right: both ChatGPT and Bard won’t sing the
praises of Trump but will say nice things about Biden. I’ll leave the discussion
about so-called guardrails to another day.)

It was a fascinating experience. I was honored to be included.

For the sake of contrast, in the morning before the hearing, I called Sven
Størmer Thaulow, chief data and technology officer for Schibsted, the
much-admired (and properly so) news and media company of Scandinavia. Last
summer, Thaulow called for Norwegian media companies to contribute their content
freely to make a Norwegian-language large language model. “The response,” the
company said, “was overwhelmingly positive.” I wanted to hear more.

Thaulow explained that they are examining the opportunities for a
native-language LLM in two phases: first research, then commercialization. In
the research phase now, working with universities, they want to see whether a
native model beats an English-language adaptation, and in their benchmark tests,
it does. As a media company, Schibsted has also experimented with using
generative AI to allow readers to query its database of gadget reviews in
conversation, rather than just searching — something I wish US news
organizations would do: Instead of complaining about the technology, use it to
explore new opportunities.

Media companies contribute their content to the research. A national
organization is making a blanket deal and individual companies are free to opt
out. Norway being Norway — sane and smart — 90 percent of its books are already
digitized and the project may test whether adding them will improve the model’s
performance. If it does, they and government will deal with compensation then.

All of this is before the commercial phase. When that comes, they will have to
grapple with fair shares of value.

How much more sensible this approach is to what we see in the US, where
technology companies and media companies face off, with Capitol Hill as as their
field of play, each side trying to play the refs there. The AI companies, to my
mind, rushed their services to market without sufficient research about impact
and harm, misleading users (like hapless Michael Cohen) about their
capabilities. Media companies rushed their lobbyists to Congress to cash in the
political capital earned through journalism to seek protectionism and favors
from the politicians their journalists are supposed to cover, independently.
Politicians use legislation to curry favor in turn with powerful and rich
industries.

Why can’t we be more like Norway?

JOURNALISM AND AI

January 9, 2024 | 1 Comment
ai, congress, journalism, LLMs, regulation, senate

> Here are are my written remarks for a hearing on AI and the future of
> journalism for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and
> the Law, on January 10, 2024.

I have been a journalist for fifty years and a journalism professor for the last
eighteen.

1. History

I would like to begin with three lessons on the history of news and copyright,
which I learned researching my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print
and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (Bloomsbury, 2023):

First, America’s 1790 Copyright Act covered only charts, maps, and books. The
New York Times’ suit against OpenAI claims that, “Since our nation’s founding,
strong copyright protection has empowered those who gather and report news to
secure the fruits of their labor and investment.” In truth, newspapers were not
covered in the statute until 1909 and even then, according to Will Slauter,
author of Who Owns the News: A History of Copyright (Stanford, 2019), there was
debate over whether to include news articles, for they were the products of the
institution more than an author.

Second, the Post Office Act of 1792 allowed newspapers to exchange copies for
free, enabling journalists with the literal title of “scissors editor” to copy
and reprint each others’ articles, with the explicit intent to create a network
for news, and with it a nation.

Third, exactly a century ago, when print media faced their first competitor —
radio — newspapers were hostile in their reception. Publishers strong-armed
broadcasters into signing the 1933 Biltmore Agreement by threatening not to
print program listings. The agreement limited radio to two news updates a day,
without advertising; required radio to buy their news from newspapers’ wire
services; and even forbade on-air commentators from discussing any event until
twelve hours afterwards — a so-called “hot news doctrine,” which the Associated
Press has since tried to resurrect. Newspapers lobbied to keep radio reporters
out of the Congressional press galleries. They also lobbied for radio to be
regulated, carving an exception to the First Amendment’s protections of freedom
of expression and the press.

Publishers accused radio — just as they have since accused television and the
internet and AI — of stealing “their” content, audience, and revenue, as if each
had been granted them by royal privilege. In scholar Gwenyth Jackaway’s words,
publishers “warned that the values of democracy and the survival of our
political system” would be endangered by radio. That sounds much like the sacred
rhetoric in The Times’ OpenAI suit: “Independent journalism is vital to our
democracy. It is also increasingly rare and valuable.”

To this day, journalists — whether on radio or at The New York Times — read,
learn from, and repurpose facts and knowledge gained from the work of fellow
journalists. Without that assured freedom, newspapers and news on television and
radio and online could not function. The real question at hand is whether
artificial intelligence should have the same right that journalists and we all
have: the right to read, the right to learn, the right to use information once
known. If it is deprived of such rights, what might we lose?

2. Opportunities

Rather than dwelling on a battle of old technology and titans versus new, I
prefer to focus here on the good that might come from news collaborating with
this new technology.

First, though, a caveat: I argue it is irresponsible to use large language
models where facts matter, for we know that LLMs have no sense of fact; they
only predict words. News companies, including CNET, G/O Media, and Gannett, have
misstepped, using the technology to manufacture articles at scale, strewn with
errors. I covered the show-cause hearing for a New York attorney who (like
President Trump’s former counsel, Michael Cohen) used an LLM to list case
citations. Federal District Judge P. Kevin Castel made clear that the problem
was not the technology but its misuse by humans. Lawyers and journalists alike
must exercise caution in using generative AI to do their work.

Having said that, AI presents many intriguing possibilities for news and media.
For example:

AI has proven to be excellent at translation. News organizations could use it to
present their news internationally.

Large language models are good at summarizing a limited corpus of text. This is
what Google’s NotebookLM does, helping writers organize their research.

AI can analyze more text than any one reporter. I brainstormed with an editor
about having citizens record 100 school-board meetings so the technology could
transcribe them and then answer questions about how many boards are discussing,
say, banning books.

I am fascinated with the idea that AI could extend literacy, helping people who
are intimidated by writing tell and illustrate their own stories.

A task force of academics from the Modern Language Association concluded AI in
the classroom could help students with word play, analyzing writing styles,
overcoming writers’ block, and stimulating discussion.

AI also enables anyone to write computer code. As an AI executive told me in a
podcast about AI that I cohost, “English majors are taking the world back… The
hottest programming language on planet Earth right now is English.”

Because LLMs are in essence a concordance of all available language online, I
hope to see scholars examine them to study society’s biases and clichés.

And I see opportunities for publishers to put large language models in front of
their content to allow readers to enter into dialog with that content, asking
their own questions and creating new subscription benefits. I know an
entrepreneur who is building such a business.

Note that in Norway, the country’s largest and most prestigious publisher,
Schibsted, is leading the way to build a Norwegian-language large language model
and is urging all publishers to contribute content. In the US, Aimee Rinehart,
an executive student of mine at CUNY who works on AI at the Associated Press, is
also studying the possibility of an LLM for the news industry.

3. Risks

All these opportunities and more are put at risk if we fence off the open
internet into private fortresses.

Common Crawl is a foundation that for sixteen years has archived the entire web:
250 billion pages, 10 petabytes of text made available to scholars for free,
yielding 10,000 research papers. I am disturbed to learn that The New York Times
has demanded that the entire history of its content — that which was freely
available — be erased. Personally, when I learned that my books were included in
the Books3 data set used to train large language models, I was delighted, for I
write not only to make money but also to spread ideas.

What happens to our information ecosystem when all authoritative news retreats
behind paywalls, available only to privileged citizens and giant corporations
able to pay for it? What happens to our democracy when all that is left out in
public for free — to inform both citizens and machines — is propaganda,
disinformation, conspiracies, spam, and lies? I well understand the economic
plight of my industry, for I direct a Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. But
I also say we must have a discussion about journalism’s moral obligation to an
informed society and about the right not only to speak but to learn.

4. Copyright

And we need to talk about reimaging copyright in this age of change, starting
with a discussion about generative AI as fair and transformative use. When the
Copyright Office sought opinions on artificial intelligence and copyright
(Docket 2023-6), I responded with concern about an idea the Office raised of
establishing compulsory licensing schemes for training data. Technology
companies already offer simple opt-out mechanisms (see: robots.TXT).

Copyright at its origin in the Statute of Anne of 1710 was enacted not to
protect creators, as is commonly asserted. Instead, it was passed at the demand
of booksellers and publishers to establish a marketplace for creativity as a
tradeable asset. Our concepts of creativity-as-content and content-as-property
have their roots in copyright.

Now along come machines — large language models and generative AI — that
manufacture endless content. University of Maryland Professor Matthew
Kirschenbaum warns of what he calls “the Textpocalypse.” Artificial intelligence
commodifies the idea of content, even devalues it. I welcome this. For I hope it
might drive journalists to understand that their value is not in manufacturing
the commodity, content. Instead, they must see journalism as a service to help
citizens inform public discourse and improve their communities.

In 2012, I led a series of discussions with multiple stakeholders — media
executives, creative artists, policymakers — for a project with the World
Economic Forum on rethinking intellectual property and the support of creativity
in the digital age. In the safe space of Davos, even media executives would
concede that copyright is outmoded. Out of this work, I conceived of a framework
I call “creditright,” which I’ve written is “the right to receive credit for
contributions to a chain of collaborative inspiration, creation, and
recommendation of creative work. Creditright would permit the behaviors we want
to encourage to be recognized and rewarded. Those behaviors might include
inspiring a work, creating that work, remixing it, collaborating in it,
performing it, promoting it. The rewards might be payment or merely credit as
its own reward.” It is just one idea, intended to spark discussion.

Publishers constantly try to extend copyright’s restrictions in their favor,
arguing that platforms owe them the advertising revenue they lost when their
customers fled for better, competitive deals online. This began in 2013 with
German publishers lobbying for a Leistungsschutzrecht, or ancillary copyright,
which inspired further protectionist legislation, including Spain’s link tax,
articles 15 and 17 of the EU’s Copyright Directive, Australia’s News Media
Bargaining Code, and most recently Canada’s Bill C-18, which requires large
platforms — namely Google and Facebook — to negotiate with publishers for the
right to link to their news. To gain an exemption from the law, Google agreed to
pay about $75 million to publishers — generous, but hardly enough to save the
industry. Meta decided instead to take down links to news rather than being
forced to pay to link. That is Meta’s right under Canada’s Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, for compelled speech is not free speech.

In this process, lobbyists for Canada’s publishers insisted that their headlines
were valuable while Meta’s links were not. The nonmarket intervention of C-18
sided with the publishers. But as it turned out, when those links disappeared,
Facebook lost no traffic while publishers lost up to a third of theirs. The
market spoke: Links are valuable. Legislation to restrict linking would break
the internet for all.

I fear that the proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) and
the California Journalism Protection Act (CJPA) could have similar effect here.
As a journalist, I must say that I am offended to see publishers lobby for
protectionist legislation, trading on the political capital earned through
journalism. The news should remain independent of — not beholden to — the public
officials it covers. I worry that publishers will attempt to extend copyright to
their benefit not only with search and social platforms but now with AI
companies, disadvantaging new and small competitors in an act of regulatory
capture.

5. Support for innovation

The answer for both technology and journalism is to support innovation. That
means enabling open-source development, encouraging both AI models and data —
such as that offered by Common Crawl — to be shared freely.

Rather than protecting the big, old newspaper chains — many of them now
controlled by hedge funds, which will not invest or innovate in news — it is
better to nurture new competition. Take, for example, the 450 members of the New
Jersey News Commons, which I helped start a decade ago at Montclair State
University; and the 475 members of the Local Independent Online News Publishers;
the 425 members of the Institute for Nonprofit News; and the 4,000 members of
the News Product Alliance, which I also helped start at CUNY. This is where
innovation in news is occurring: bottom-up, grass-roots efforts emergent from
communities.

There are many movements to rebuild journalism. I helped develop one: a degree
program called Engagement Journalism. Others include Solutions Journalism,
Constructive Journalism, Reparative Journalism, Dialog Journalism, and
Collaborative Journalism. What they share is an ethic of first listening to
communities and their needs.

In my upcoming book, The Web We Weave, I ask technologists, scholars, media,
users, and governments to enter into covenants of mutual obligation for the
future of the internet and, by extension, AI.

There I propose that you, as government, promise first to protect the rights of
speech and assembly made possible by the internet. Base decisions that affect
internet rights on rational proof of harms, not protectionism for threatened
industries and not media’s moral panic. Do not splinter the internet along
national borders. And encourage and enable new competition and openness rather
than entrenching incumbent interests through regulatory capture.

In short, I seek a Hippocratic Oath for the internet: First, do no harm.

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