01/11/2024

Experts Warn Congress of Dangers AI Poses to Journalism

They note its contribution to the decline of professional journalism

AI poses a grave threat to journalism, experts warned Congress at a hearing on Wednesday.

Media executives and academic experts testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law about how AI is contributing to the big tech-fueled decline of journalism. They also talked about intellectual property issues arising from AI models being trained on the work of journalists, and raised alarms about the increasing dangers of AI-powered misinformation.

"The rise of big tech has been directly responsible for the decline in local news," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and chair of the subcommittee. "First, Meta, Google and OpenAI are using the hard work of newspapers and authors to train their AI models without compensation or credit. Adding insult to injury, those models are then used to compete with newspapers and broadcasters, cannibalizing readership and revenue from the journalistic institutions that generate the content in the first place."

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.