AI trying to kill local journalism
Last Friday, Google issued an ultimatum, announcing that it was taking steps to block news stories in California in response to a bill from state Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland. The California Journalism Preservation Act would require tech giants to pay journalists, like me, for profiting from our labor. Google’s move followed a similar threat by Meta last year over the bill.
Big Tech’s threats to ban journalism from its platforms in California are just the beginning. Tomorrow’s artificial intelligence-powered internet is poised to finish off local journalism as we know it — unless lawmakers act.
For much of the past two decades, Google and news publishers have operated on an implicit bargain; outlets like the Chronicle or the Los Angeles Times, where I was a longtime reporter, would allow Google to crawl and feature my stories on its services. In exchange, Google would send these publishers a river of users via hyperlinks.
The understanding was that users who no longer subscribe to print newspapers would look at digital ads on news websites or buy digital subscriptions. In return, those users would presumably continue using Google (itself a profitable seller of digital advertising) as their preferred portal to find high-quality information from a variety of sources.
That arrangement has become increasingly unfair for newsrooms — and the California communities that count on them.
You don’t need an MBA to figure out that commandeering endless free labor from journalists and other content creators has been the deal of the century for Google. The internet giant has cornered 90% of all search engine traffic, collecting $48 billion in digital advertising revenue last quarter alone.
Wicks’ bill would require Google, under threat of arbitration, to return a share of these revenues earned from journalism back to news publishers, which would be required to reinvest 70% of those funds into journalism jobs. Australia and Canada have passed similar laws.
Absent these changes — and more ambitious ideas like them — the economics supporting local journalism in California will continue to collapse. The Los Angeles Times newsroom has roughly 40% fewer journalists than in 2019. Many of the savviest digital newsroom innovators I know have lost or left their journalism jobs.
Wicks’ bill has only become more urgent as Google experiments with generative AI, which also scrapes news sites but this time without any pretense that journalists will receive compensation. Some Google search responses already compile an AI-generated blurb that summarizes news stories.
Jim Albrecht, senior director of news ecosystem products at Google from 2017 to 2023, recently wrote in the Washington Post that AI-powered chatbots, not human-written articles like the one you’re reading right now, are the future of news.
“Publishers will have to think less about those articles and more about conversations with users,” Albrecht wrote. “The users will interact less and less with the actual articles and instead talk about the articles with what the tech industry used to call ‘intelligent agents.’ ”
Anybody hoping to shore up Google’s still-significant referral traffic to publishers — or anyone who’s propagandizing that the idea of paying journalists is tantamount to a “link tax” (the government never touches Google’s money) — is fighting yesterday’s war. The old internet where users actively hunt for information and prowl from site to site is dying.
Following hyperlinks in search of accurate information is annoying, inefficient and increasingly filled with scammy clutter. On the fenced-in internet of tomorrow, AI-powered portals controlled by a small handful of powerful international companies will treat us like stationary consumers who passively expect knowledge and content to come to us, not the other way around.
Think of the uncanny algorithms of TikTok’s For You Page, OpenAI’s general purpose GPT chat interfaces or Elon Musk’s (not exactly successful but persistent) quest to transform the once hyperlink-friendly Twitter into X, an “everything app” where users “can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever you’d like.”
The dream of the open internet is fading and being replaced by a surveillance-driven dystopia powered by free and low-paid labor. The California Journalism Preservation Act is just the first of many bills that will be necessary to point out that this content-creation arrangement is unsustainable for workers — and also everyone else.
With each day that passes, data-devouring AI models like the kind Google is developing, which are prone to inaccurate “hallucinations,” are at greater risk of ingesting and plagiarizing their own lowquality vomit for want of enough original knowledge to consume. It’s in the longterm interest of artificial intelligence developers to help foot the bill for original, human-produced local journalism because AI models will need more material that’s “grounded” in the real world — to borrow an AI term for verification.
As a journalist, I’m largely indifferent to how the public consumes my reporting. Throughout American history, we have always adapted to changes in the medium; maybe you’d like to get news alerts and investigative reports from me via text message? Journalists will go wherever you want us to be.
But if California and Google still want to have independent journalists around — people who will report what’s going on in our communities, investigate corruption in local government and dig up hidden documents, even if just to feed an AI — somebody is going to have to pay us to do it. The California Journalism Preservation Act reasonably suggests that the people who profit from journalists’ work should help foot the bill.