The Missing Link
It would be a little ironic for one of the internet’s first news curators to express concern about the trend of news stories getting summarized into bite-sized, easily readable encapsulations. But irony died months ago, so here goes. The way the web has worked for decades — you search, you get results, you click on a link — is being replaced by a new model. You ask, the machine answers. The information is often coming from the same sources that exist on the other side of the links you used to click on. But now you don’t need to click. Thus, content publishers aren’t getting the traffic they once did. Publishers actually love human news curators because they drive traffic to their sites. That’s why a lot of journalists and editors send me links to their latest stories. But the machine curators don’t need anyone to share links and they sure aren’t passing them on to potential readers. “Large language models also train on copious materials in the public domain—but much of what is most useful to these models, particularly as users seek real-time information from chatbots, is news that exists behind a paywall. Publishers are creating the value, but AI companies are intercepting their audiences, subscription fees, and ad revenue.” And it’s not just news. It’s non-fiction in general. “Book publishers, especially those of nonfiction and textbooks, also told me they anticipate a massive decrease in sales, as chatbots can both summarize their books and give detailed explanations of their contents.” Alex Reisner in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The End of Publishing as We Know It.
+ “A group of authors has accused Microsoft of using nearly 200,000 pirated books to create an artificial intelligence model, the latest allegation in the long legal fight over copyrighted works between creative professionals and technology companies … The authors requested a court order blocking Microsoft’s infringement and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work that Microsoft allegedly misused.” (At this point, the judge will probably ask ChatGPT how to rule…)
