Media executives urge Congress to enact legislation to prevent AI models from training on ‘stolen goods’

A group of media executives urged lawmakers on Wednesday to enact new legislation that would force artificial intelligence developers to pay publishers for use of their content to train their computer models.

A group of media executives urged lawmakers on Wednesday to enact new legislation that would force artificial intelligence developers to pay publishers for use of their content to train their computer models. The hearing before the US Senate comes after a blitz of new AI chatbots, most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, set off a wave of existential panic among media organizations, threatening to further upend the business, which has slashed thousands of jobs in recent years. Roger Lynch, Condé Nast’s chief executive, told senators that current AI models were built using “stolen goods,” with chatbots scraping and displaying news articles from publishers without their permission or compensation. News organizations, Lynch said, seldom have a say in whether their content is used to train AI or is output by the models. “The answer is they’ve already used it, the models are already trained,” he said. “So, where you hear some of the AI companies say that they are creating or allow opt-outs, it’s great, they’ve already trained their models — the only thing the opt-outs will do is to prevent a new competitor from training new models to compete with them.” While a December lawsuit by The New York Times laid bare news publishers’ desire to hamper AI models from scraping their news articles without compensation, the issue is not exclusive to the news media industry. In 2023, two major lawsuits were filed against AI companies, one from Sarah Silverman and two authors, and another 8,000-plus class-action lawsuit that includes such names as Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, and George R. R. Martin.