The era of artificial intelligence announced its arrival less than four years ago with the public launch of ChatGPT. Within months, OpenAI’s chatbot collected 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing consumer product in history. Today, it is one of many increasingly powerful AI offerings, alongside those of Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and X.
There is little doubt that generative artificial intelligence represents the next major tech revolution, one that brings with it a dizzying array of important questions. Will AI spur a surge of productivity? Eliminate entire categories of jobs? Will AI unlock amazing medical breakthroughs? Facilitate a biological attack? Can the actions of AI models and agents be fully understood? Can they be controlled?
I’m here today to talk about questions that are, admittedly, somewhat narrower. But they matter a great deal to me, and to you and to society.
How will AI change the news? How will those changes affect the information ecosystem that serves as the public square for engaged citizens worldwide? And what can the people in this room do to ensure the future of firsthand, fact-based reporting that’s essential to the health of our democracies?
The early signs offer reasons for us to be concerned.
The companies driving AI, already among the richest and most powerful in human history, are consolidating their outsize control over our data and our attention. At the same time, they are failing to embrace a core responsibility that comes with this power — to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information.
Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products — a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day.
As a result, I fear we are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting — going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful. A future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy — the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism — continues to dry up.
This potential damage extends far beyond news. AI companies have raided civilization’s entire corpus of original works, an act that also poses a danger to the future of books, movies, music, research and an array of other fields. In the United States, these industries represent not just the heart of American cultural and intellectual life, but a pillar of its economy and one of its most powerful exports. Globally, creative professions employ over 50 million people worldwide who produce roughly $12 trillion of economic value a year.
The people gathered today lead news organizations from more than 60 countries. That means you have already fought through the gauntlet of pressures that have battered journalism everywhere, from disappearing revenues to technological intermediation to mounting attacks on press freedom. But on AI, we must do more. Our profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution.
We cannot allow AI cheerleaders to dominate the public conversation without interjecting to argue for the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for original journalism. We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.
Some tech leaders will portray my comments today as anti-AI. As defending the old status quo. As yet another ossified institution lashing out at the innovators who are driving the forward march of progress. And to be fair to our colleagues in Silicon Valley, there is a tradition of legacy incumbents — say a 175-year-old newspaper — complaining about new technologies and the disrupters behind them.
So it’s worth stating this plainly: The news organization I lead, The New York Times, has a long record of embracing technology to advance the mission of independent journalism. We have a history of respectful partnerships with tech companies to bring that journalism to new readers in new ways. Meeting disruptions with curiosity, openness and adaptability helped us navigate the collapse of our print business and come out stronger on the other side. Today my colleagues are using AI technology — responsibly, ethically and with humans making the decisions — to improve how we report, edit, distribute and monetize our journalism. Holding a powerful new technology at arms length is a recipe for failure.
And I fully believe AI has the power to do a great deal of good in the world. I’m not calling AI — or the tech giants that control this technology — inherently bad or evil. I’m warning that AI companies are making choices that violate settled law, threaten the viability of creative work and appear likely to cause a great deal of unnecessary harm.
News organizations should want the good AI can bring. But tech companies should also want to support the healthy, sustainable flow of the information and ideas and creativity that powers AI — to ensure their actions don’t lead us to a tragedy of the civic commons.
This is excerpted from a speech given Monday at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille.
