Meta to Mine Media for More “AI” Training Data
We read this week in the Wall Street Journal that Meta is on the prowl for more content to train its ever-hungry AI tools and chatbot.
By: Decca Muldowney and Emily M. Bender
We read this week in the Wall Street Journal that Meta is on the prowl for more content to train its ever-hungry AI tools and chatbot. Their most recent targets are media companies Axel Springer, News Corp and Fox Corp. Between them these three companies own a significant slice of the media landscape including the publications Business Insider, POLITICO, The Wall Street Journal itself, the New York Post, the Dow Jones newswires, and all Fox News channels and affiliates. Meta wants to license the companies’ articles for use in AI training (without the consent of any of the writers, of course!)
This news broke within a day of Status reporting that journalists at Business Insider, which is owned by Axel-Springer, had been told they could use “AI” for research and to produce the first drafts of stories - although final products had to be the journalists’ “own work” according to an internal memo. Status reported that it seemed unlikely any label would be attached to articles informing readers that AI had been used in the writing process.
Why is all this bad for reporters, for journalism, and for readers of the news like us? Well, let us count the ways… For news readers it means we have ever fewer reliable sources to go to and meanwhile the pollution keeps pouring into our information ecosystem. For journalism, at a systemic level, it means an overall loss of trust. And as for reporters, we feel especially bad for those who are still doing their jobs in good faith, but whose work is hosted on outlets like Business Insider that are known to use synthetic text and not disclose it, tainting everything they post.
Here are some Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 episodes to get you up to speed on why “AI” is not the answer to better, faster, or more productive journalism:
How LLMs Are Breaking the News: Award-winning journalist Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, tells us all about the devastating impacts “AI” tools are having on labor conditions for journalists, and the quality of news. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
Newsrooms Pivot to Bullshit: Samantha Cole of worker-owned tech news site 404 Media joins us to discuss journalism, LLMs, and why synthetic text is the antithesis of good reporting. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
We also wrote about the very real problems facing journalism, and why newsroom bosses think “AI” tools are the answer, in The AI Con. As we said there: “The drive to adopt AI is, of course, part of a much longer story about the decline of quality journalism across the world, driven by the dramatic reduction of advertising revenues, the consolidation of media companies, and the loss of trust in media as an institution.” But turning to Big Tech for help is not the answer. At best, it’s too little, too late to save the journalism we love. At worst, it’s “actively exacerbating the problem by generating more synthetic text and image garbage that goes right back into the news ecosystem.”
Our book, The AI Con, is now available wherever fine books are sold!
