In the USA, an association of organizations operating in the sphere of mass media has appealed to companies developing artificial intelligence technologies with a request to scrape news materials to train chatbots.

The News Media Alliance, which represents the interests of almost 2,000 American organizations in the mentioned sphere, last Tuesday, October 31, published the results of a study indicating that developers of machine intelligence systems, including OpenAI and Google, copied and applied news, magazine and digital content to train their bots.

In this case, an important result of this study is that it was established that the configurations of artificial intelligence were configured in such a way that it trusted the information of certain media resources to a greater extent and carefully perceived the data published by other sources from the point of view of their compliance with the real state of affairs.

Danielle Coffey, executive director of the News Media Alliance, said that AI companies and developers are not only involved in the practice of unauthorized copying of the content of the authors of news platforms for training digital products but also use these materials everywhere. According to the head of the association of organizations, this fact indicates that representatives of the technology sector recognize the unique value of these data, but at the same time, most of them do not have permits granting the right to apply the mentioned materials.

Danielle Coffey says that reducing the amount of high-quality content is a negative trend not only from the point of view of publishers’ interests but also for the sustainability of artificial intelligence models. Also, according to her, in this case, the availability of reliable information is deteriorating, which can be trusted as an objective description of the processes taking place in the space of reliable reality, and the phenomena included in the list of constituent elements of being.

In the published technical document, the Alliance rejected the viability of arguments that artificial intelligence models in the framework of interaction with news materials simply study facts by reading various data sets within the algorithm inherent in the logic of human perception. The organization claims that such deductions are inaccurate.

The Working Group stated that machine intelligence systems retain the facts contained in their copied educational materials and are protected by copyright, but do not assimilate any underlying concepts. From this statement, it can also be concluded that the AI perceives information out of context, after which a set of disparate data is formed in its digital consciousness, not ordered within a single semantic category. This is the negative aspect of chatbots, which do not have a conceptual understanding of the information coming from the external environment. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that this is one of the points of view, and not a universal conclusion, the validity of which is generally recognized. The mentioned negative aspect is also due to copyright infringement, which has already become what can be described as standard practice. However, the prevalence of an action is not the basis for its legitimization.

Publishers, many of whom are in a state of tacit confrontation with artificial intelligence developers, have recently begun to take measures to protect their content. In August, it became known that some major media companies had implemented the code on their websites. This solution will protect the content from AI that searches for information in the Internet space.

The News Media Alliance has created a set of recommendations for news publishers to protect them in the realities of the new digital age. In this case, the organization suggests that politicians recognize the fact that unauthorized use of copyrighted materials for training chatbots should be qualified as a violation of the law. The News Media Alliance also insists that publishers should be able to license their content.

The organization stated that American culture, economy, and democracy require that the media industry has the opportunity to grow and flourish in the era of the revolutionary development of artificial intelligence.

As we have reported earlier, Siemens and Microsoft to Work Together on AI Assistant.