Other Side Of AI: Online Content Publishers Evaluate Legal Options Against Content Usage By Microsoft, Google’s AI Bots

Online content publishers see a threat from artificial intelligence technologys capabilities since thearrival of chatbotscapable of conversations, making up sonnets, and acing the LSAT. Lately, publishing executives have begun examining the extent of their content use to train AI tools likeChatGPTto evaluate compensation and legal options, the Wall Street Journalreportsciting people familiar with meetings organized by the News Media Alliance publishing trade group. Microsoft CorpMSFT integratedOpenAIchatbot ChatGPT intothe Bing search engineand other tools.Alphabet IncGOOG GOOGL Googlesconversational program, Bard can generate humanlike responses. Whether AI companies have the legal right to scrape content off the internet and feed it into their training models became a major debatable point. Publishers remain concerned about losing traffic and advertising dollars to AI tools. Microsofts direct payments to publishers in the form of content-licensing deals for its MSN platform do not cover AI products. Google has already struck deals to pay some publishers for using their content in Google News Showcase. Publishers have relied on tech companies such as Google andMeta Platforms IncsMETA Facebook to help their content reach a wide audience. However, the publishers increasingly pushed those companies to pay for using it.