Rupert Murdoch said News Corp is “absolutely focused” on “both the opportunities and the challenges” posed by the rise of advanced artificial intelligence tools.
At News Corp’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday in his new role as chairman emeritus, Murdoch revealed that the owner of The Post and the Wall Street Journal is already deep in negotiations related to providing original content to companies building generative AI tools.
“Our digital development has enabled us to expand the delivery of news, analysis, books and real estate intelligence,” Murdoch said. “In an era of generative AI, those businesses will surely grow.”
Murdoch likewise signaled News Corp is determined to make sure that AI tools compensate news organizations for their content. This week, a study published by Columbia University estimated that Google and Meta alone should pay upward of $14 billion per year to news outlets to account for search ad revenue.
“We are already playing a leading role in the important debate over the value of our original content for AI providers and are engaged in advanced negotiations with key partners,” Murdoch said.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson noted the company has “led the quest for compensation for content from the big digital platforms” over the last decade and has “entered a new phase of negotiations with the rise of Generative AI.”
“It is reassuring that the prescient executives at the largest AI companies understand that Gen AI cannot be degenerative, that the recomposition of content cannot lead to the decomposition of creativity,” Thomson added.
The rise of AI tools could result in more scrutiny for Big Tech giants such as Meta and Google, which already face a mounting campaign to pay news outlets for their content. In 2021, Australia passed a law requiring tech firms to negotiate content deals with publishers.
That same year, News Corp reached a landmark deal in which it agreed to provide content from its news sites to Google in exchange for “significant payments” from the tech giant.
Tech firms have pushed back on similar laws, including one that recently took effect in Canada and others proposed in California and on Capitol Hill.
In September, Thomson called out signs of left-wing bias present in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other chatbots — and described their tendency to spit out nonsensical responses as “rubbish in, rubbish out, rubbish all about.”
Months earlier, Thomson warned that the rise of AI could “fatally undermine” journalism. He expressed particular concern that the intellectual property of News Corp brands is “being harvested and scraped” to train AI models.