News Corp’s global chief executive has described news organisations as a valuable “input” for artificial intelligence, as the media empire signs an AI content licensing deal with Meta worth up to US$50m (A$71m) a year.
In an upbeat presentation, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s company, Robert Thomson, said the “reliable” breaking news and information in publications like the Australian, the Times of London and Dow Jones was “hard to beat” as an “input” for AI.
The Meta deal, which was revealed by the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal earlier this week and is expected to last at least three years, will allow Facebook and Instagram’s parent company to scrape News Corp’s US and UK content to train its artificial-intelligence products.
The outlets include the Journal, and the New York Post however the Australian mastheads which include the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun are not part of the deal.
“We’re essentially an input company,” Thomson told a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco on Monday 2 March ahead of the landmark Meta deal.
“The great threat in the age of AI is going to be to what you might call output companies. We’re an input in the way that semiconductors are an input, in the way that datacentres are an input, in the way that energy is an input.
“You look at breaking news, you look at unique real estate information.”
Thomson, who signed a $US250m, five-year deal with OpenAI in 2024 said the opportunities AI offered for news organisations were greater than the risks.
He said he took a “woo or sue” approach – in which he welcomed deals with AI companies but he would sue them if they took the publisher’s content illegally.
Thomson said he had a good relationship with Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, and spoke to him often, as he did with Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta:
“Mark and I converse on a pretty regular basis, across WhatsApp, obviously”.
In Australia, News Corp has taken a more adversarial approach to social media companies, blaming them for social cohesion issues across the globe.
News Corp Australia’s executive chair, Michael Miller, called for media to present a united front against the platforms and AI companies seeking content for free.
News Corp has embraced the use of AI in its journalism as well. The Australian arm of the business introduced an in-house AI tool called “NewsGPT”, which some journalists have expressed concern about.
The news media has seen artificial intelligence and its integration into search engines as a threat to the sustainability of professional journalism as Google has integrated AI into search which has reduced the number of people who click through into news websites.
The 2024 deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI brought news content from the Journal, the Post, the Times and the Sunday Times to the artificial intelligence platform.
Other publications, including the New York Times, have taken a different tack: suing…
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