Last month, Pope Leo XIV delivered an encyclical entitled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The document reverberated around the world as the first ever American pope took a stand as a moral philosopher and world leader challenging the primacy of technology and warning us all to “disarm” AI.
And this month, A.G. Sulzberger, the leader of what might be considered the high church of American journalism, The New York Times, delivered his own version of an encyclical that offered a stark warning to us all about the perils of AI platforms for traditional media.
Sulzberger stated, “Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products — a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale.”
Sulzberger delivered the keynote address at the World News Media Congress in Marseille on June 1st, an annual gathering in the French city that brings together leaders of media and technology, using the phrase “original sin” to characterize AI’s brazen scraping of what they call “data,” but which is known as “journalism” by everybody else.
Bless A.G. Sulzberger for casting this struggle in biblical terms.
It is interesting to see how Sulzberger’s “encyclical” runs parallel to the papal one, as both leaders are talking about safeguarding what is human — for Sulzberger human-centered journalism — in the time of artificial intelligence.
With a nod to the title of Pope Leo’s encyclical and with apologies to my high school Latin teachers, perhaps we might title Sulzberger’s declaration “Magnificus Nuntium,” or “Magnificent Journalism.”
It turns out the word ‘journalism’ was not really a thing back in ancient Rome and so there is not a Latin word for it. But “Nuntium,” which translates roughly as “news,” seems to be the closest I could get to giving Sulzberger’s speech a more pontifical title.
But the most important distinction between these two global thought leaders is in their call to action. While the pope pleads for “disarming” AI, Sulzberger seems to be closer to declaring war to protect the property rights of journalism organizations that are seeing their content stolen in broad daylight by AI platforms.
“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution,” Sulzberger said.
He added, “We cannot allow A.I. cheerleaders to dominate the public conversation without interjecting to argue for the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for original journalism. We cannot watch as A.I. companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.”
In this escalating holy war over who owns the truths that journalism works hard to discern, Sulzberger seeks to clarify the precise meaning behind what he is saying:
“I’m not calling AI — or the tech giants that control this technology — inherently bad or evil. I’m simply warning that AI companies are making choices, choices that violate settled law, threaten the viability of creative work, and appear likely to cause a great deal of unnecessary harm.”
AI companies are reluctant to offer compensation for the journalism they scrape from websites which they reductively call “data”. However, as Sulzberger points out, the AI companies seem to clearly understand the need to pay for other elements that power their platforms.
“Talent, compute, energy and data are all essential to the success of A.I. and, therefore, to the success of the tech giants. The first three are paid for because — of course they are. No tech C.E.O. would dare suggest forcing the most talented engineers to work for free… Nor would they consider stealing chips from a Nvidia factory or illegally tapping a power line. Investors consider the potential financial rewards of A.I. to be so great that they are embracing losses that run into the hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers and power plants. In contrast, A.I. companies take “data” without consent or compensation.”
And this theft isn’t just happening because publishers are leaving their toys out on the lawn; it’s happening when they are locked up safely in the house. A study found that about 30 percent of AI bot scrapes violate explicit restrictions on accessing and taking websites’ content, including content protected behind paywalls,” Sulzberger states.
The battle ground for this war will be in courthouses. For its part, The New York Times decided to take OpenAI and its partner Microsoft to court “for brazen violations of our intellectual property rights protected by US copyright law both in the training of their models and the ongoing use of our work in their products,” he said.
“But lawsuits are slow and they’re expensive — ours has already stretched two-and-a-half years and cost over 20 million dollars. As AI companies are doubtlessly aware, most news organizations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights,” Sulzberger explained.
If you have been reading this newsletter, it comes as no surprise that profound disruption caused by the tech industry has decimated journalism. The U.S. has already lost more than 3,000 newspapers over the last 20 years. But the threat posed by the AI disruption is poised to be far more damaging.
In the old paradigm of web 2.0, there was a value exchange of sorts, one that was weighted against journalism but a business model in which journalism organizations willingly engaged. The digital platforms like Google and Facebook offered publishers a way to reach larger audiences that in exchange brought those organizations ad revenue. Part of the crisis in journalism has to do with the inequity in that value exchange as those two leading platforms, Google and Facebook, took control of about two-thirds of all digital advertising, leaving the traditional media fighting over a small piece of the total advertising pie. So the last great tech development created a formula that did not work well for traditional media.
But in the AI era, the idea of search engines is shifting to the concept of answer engines. In the new model, platforms such as Google are providing users with direct answers, with the consequence that “getting a Google user to click a link, according to industry research, is 10 times harder today than it was a decade ago,” Sulzberger said.
“This dynamic has, of course, led traffic to news websites to plummet,“ he said, citing Comscore research which showed that the largest newspapers they tracked had seen traffic declines of more than 45 percent over the last four years.
So Sulzberger is sounding an alarm, saying, “We cannot afford to be as naive this time.”
And there are practical reasons why journalism stands to lose this battle.
Given that the web 2.0 business model undercut their traditional business models and left them decimated, new organizations are smaller and weaker than two decades ago. But the tech platforms are bigger and stronger than ever — and increasingly willing to use their size and power to influence government policy in their favor.
To stand up against these forces, journalism will have to keep doing what it does best in adding value through accurate, reliable and groundbreaking journalism. And it will have to protect its ownership of the content its reporters work hard to produce. This is true at the New York Times and at leading media companies around the world. It is equally true for smaller newsrooms across the United States and around the world, and journalism organizations will need to find ways to unite and stand up for the work they do and to protect its ownership. The large AI platforms would be wise to see that they have a vested interest in keeping the industry of journalism robust and healthy if they want to continue to use it to train the large language models that drive the enterprise of AI.
“As we prepare, we must remind ourselves: information is valuable. Journalism is valuable,” Sulzberger said.
He offered concrete advice on how publishers can defend their work and build resilience against AI:
Stand up for your rights. Publishers must actively insist their rights are respected, as “the alternative path of quietly tolerating the systematic theft of your work will eventually end your ability to continue producing it,” Sulzberger said.
Deal carefully. While Sulzberger said it’s reasonable for news organizations to sign deals with AI companies, he urged publishers to consider if the payment actually represents fair value before agreeing.
Push your legislators. Collectively, the industry needs to push for strong IP protections, limits to unauthorised bot scraping, and requirements for AI platforms to reveal how they use news publishers’ work.
Join together. News publishers must work together and with other creative industries, to counteract the AI industry’s massive resources and power.
Both the pontiff and the publisher seem to agree that there is an urgency of this moment for all of us to do more to push AI to remain human centered. They both embrace the idea that AI has brought the world to a crossroads. The publisher offered a way to push back which is critical for journalism in particular, but the pope looked more broadly for safeguards for all of humanity that stands together across the world at this critical crossroads. Pope Leo offered three elemental questions that must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”
The pope explains what he means by “disarming” AI and they are words that can guide the world spiritually and in some very practical ways offer a guide to the future of journalism as well:
According to Pope Leo, “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”
Subversion of Reality | Gerry Shih, Columbia Journalism Review
AI isn’t just deepfakes. Local newsrooms are using it to better serve you and your neighborhoods | Staff, Epicenter NYC
Mexico scrapped its transparency agency. Journalists are still investigating corruption | César López Linares, LatAm Journalism Review
News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media | Nieman Lab Staff, Nieman Journalism Lab
When a Journalist Took on Corruption, He Used a Tool That Hadn’t Been Used Much in American History: the Unvarnished Truth | Jon Grinspan, Smithsonian Magazine
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