News Media Publishers Coordinate Joint Ad Campaign To Stop AI Theft By Big Tech

As the artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) sector continues growing with new models—led by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and more—not everyone is happy with its progress.

To phrase it better: Not everyone is happy with its progress if it comes at the cost of using deceitful, immoral, or illegal means.

To curb major technology companies, AKA Big Tech, from using data of creators without their permission, hundreds of publishers have joined hands in a coordinated effort, appealing to the United States government.

The joint initiative consists of an advertising campaign called Support Responsible AI and is run by the News/Media Alliance trade association. The campaign spans several ads that will appear in print and online.

The message is clear:

“STOP AI THEFT. MAKE BIG TECH PAY FOR THE CONTENT IT TAKES.”

So far, the push has drawn the attention of names such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox Media, and a whole bunch more.

“Big Tech is stealing the creative work of others, using it without permission or fair compensation to build AI products,” reads the Support Responsible AI website. “Theft of American content hurts everyone—let’s stand together for fairness and the future of quality creative content.”


The website further lists three key issues that are hurting the media and news sector.
 

1. Big Tech companies build their AI products with content from creators, artists, writers, journalists, and publishers, all without permission or compensation. 

2. Generative AI reduces traffic and engagement to original content sources, threatening the livelihood of independent creators and the sustainability of creative businesses. 

3. This harms the public: Communities lose access to reliable, high-quality, and diverse content. 

These concerns are supported by a list of statistics that make the movement even more crucial, especially considering that the global AI market is expected to hit $1.81 trillion by 2030.

Furthermore, the website highlights that AI chatbots create 96% less web traffic for content creators than traditional Google searches, despite Google claiming its AI overviews will result in increased traffic. Instead, studies find that 90% of users don’t leave Google’s search results page.

Through the campaign, the News/Media Alliance is looking to make it mandatory for Big Tech and AI companies to compensate content creators—writers, artists, journalists, and publishers—for their work.

Ahead of this, they wish to enforce transparency, sourcing, and attribution in AI-generated content, as well as prevent monopolies and anti-competitive practices in the sector.


For further reading and more information, the website lists a whitepaper on copyright infringement by AI companies, a set of AI principles to govern businesses (both locally and globally), and a list of key talking points and calls to action penned by News/Media Alliance.

The website also sports information on how other publishers can get involved in the movement, appeal to U.S. government policymakers, and share messages on social media using pre-written posts.

On the flip side, OpenAI is powering through with yet another program—the OpenAI Pioneers Program.

This program aims to advance model performance and their real-world use cases across various domains with domain-specific model evaluations. As such, it will focus on creating evals that set the bar for what good looks like and enabling the builders to optimize model performance to suit their domain.

“With the OpenAI Pioneers program, we will be working with companies building new products in high-impact verticals to expand their product capabilities through individualized efforts with our research teams,” reads the blog post announcing the program. 

OpenAI will help companies participating in the program by helping create domain-specific evals for industry and custom fine-tuned models for three industry-specific use cases.

This move adds to its recent EU Economic Blueprint for AI expansion in Europe, which builds on a previous outline to develop the AI ecosystem in the U.S., titled AI in America: OpenAI's Economic Blueprint.

Almost all leading AI model companies, including OpenAI, offer free usage tiers with limited output potential using lesser-powered models. Yet, most of them also offer paid models that deliver better performance—all of which are trained on data published by leading media houses and publishers.

Do you think Big Tech should be allowed to collect data from publishers and media houses without paying for it?

Do you think content available on public platforms is fair game for AI companies to train their models on?

Let us know in the comments below!