The rapid development of generative AI tools presents both significant opportunities and near-existential threats for publishers. And given the speed at which AI technologies are evolving, publishers are quickly finding themselves forced to decide whether to embrace the technology, or whether to fight against it.
European media giant Axel Springer is clearly in the former camp, making a number of moves recently to fold generative AI tools into its own reporting, and indeed to fold its reporting into generative AI tools.
The publisher announced a plugin for OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which will make up-to-date reporting from its news brand BILD available within ChatGPT. Users will be able to run queries relating to BILD reporting within ChatGPT, with the chatbot then surfacing the relevant information.
This follows a similar move last month for fellow Axel Springer news brand WELT, which also made its reporting available within ChatGPT via a plugin. And it comes just days after Axel Springer’s consulting group Axel Spring hy announced it has hired Jan Hasse, former director of AI innovations and ecosystems at Deloitte, as managing director of its technology division.
If you can’t beat em…
In the short term, these moves are being pitched as simply new ways of distributing content to consumers. “A broad digital presence is of crucial importance for BILD,” said Nikolaus Glasmacher, BILD’s chief digital officer, of the OpenAI integration. “The ChatGPT plugin is a valuable tool to further test and expand the importance of AI for our digital strategy.”
But AI-based distribution of publisher content is a contentious topic. Publishers are wary that a lot of the value in the answers which AI chatbots are able to deliver ultimately comes from publisher-owned content which AI systems have scraped for data.
As such, there have been ongoing discussions between publishers and tech companies over fair remuneration for this data. The FT reported last month that a number of publishers, including Axel Springer, have been in conversations with tech companies. It’s very possible that the BILD and WELD integrations with ChatGPT have resulted from these discussions, though neither Axel Springer nor OpenAI have acknowledged any money going in either direction as part of these integrations.
Payments for data are of course just one of the many challenges which AI poses for publishers. The question over how much – if at all – to use AI for creating written content is a pressing one. Axel Springer CEO Mathias Doepfner hinted in an internal letter last month that his company will start experimenting with AI-generated content. In the letter, he said that AI “has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was – or simply replace it”. He added that “understanding this change is essential to a publishing house’s future viability,”, and that “only those who create the best original content will survive”.
Doepfner said that job cuts would be coming for some roles supporting journalistic output, with AI likely to replace some tasks and roles entirely.
