Other Side Of AI: Online Content Publishers Evaluate Legal Options Against Content Usage By Microsoft, Google's AI Bots

Online content publishers see a threat from artificial intelligence technology’s capabilities since the arrival of chatbots capable of conversations, making up sonnets, and acing the LSAT.
Lately, publishing executives have begun examining the extent of their content use to “train” AI tools like ChatGPT to evaluate compensation and legal options, the Wall Street Journal reports citing people familiar with meetings organized by the News Media Alliance publishing trade group.
Microsoft Corp MSFT integrated OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT into the Bing search engine and other tools. Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google’s conversational program, Bard can generate humanlike responses.
Whether AI companies have the legal right to scrape content off the internet and feed it into their training models became a major debatable point.
Publishers remain concerned about losing traffic and advertising dollars to AI tools.
Microsoft’s direct payments to publishers in the form of content-licensing deals for its MSN platform do not cover AI products.
Google has already struck deals to pay some publishers for using their content in Google News Showcase.
Publishers have relied on tech companies such as Google and Meta Platforms Inc’s META Facebook to help their content reach a wide audience. However, the publishers increasingly pushed those companies to pay for using it.