AI Models and the Future of Journalism: A Publisher's Perspective

“And more and more it seems that the LM products out there today, Chat GPT, Anthropic, the bunch of challengers that are coming up after them, they, they will inevitably subsume, all this information. And so I have this like, I feel kind of two ways about it. Like, I'm running a media company. I have long believed that you cannot depend on platform traffic to sustain you. We don't do any search engine optimization at Big Technology. But on the other side, it seems like there's going to be a black hole where like, the financial incentive to create any content online is going to disappear for many, many people. And we'll just gonna have this information collapse.”

“Yeah, um, I'm as worried as you are. Um, you know, my career, uh, people, people sometimes say to me, your career's all over the place. You did this, and you went to Meta, and you were a journalist, and it doesn't make sense. It actually, the trajectory feels like it makes perfect sense to me right now because of the moment we're in. I tried to address some of these challenges when I was at Meta overseeing news. How do we work on business models with publishers in a way that, you know, improves the, the performance and outlook for, um, a better partnership between the platforms and publishers. I don't think that really worked. And then as soon as ChatGPT was released, it was clear to me, I think in that moment, it became clear that this is going to be how my kids get their news and information. This is the funnel through which it's going to flow. So what does that look like? How do we ensure the quality of information? And that people like you are, you know, still doing your jobs and able to make a living, to do your jobs?”