“It’s the Wild West”: Why Silicon Valley’s AI Race Could Leave the Media in Tatters

Ever since the rise of social media, news publishers have been playing a game of catchup, chasing the changes in Big Tech’s byzantine algorithms to ensure the clicks keep coming. But with AI now in the picture, the playing field is about to get even more lopsided, according to Wired global editorial director Katie Drummond and Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer. Joining Brian Stelter on the latest episode of Inside the Hive, the two media mavens discuss how tech companies like OpenAI have painted outlets into a corner by offering lucrative licensing deals that could later come back to bite them. “If you strike a deal, you get to experiment with the top technology in generative AI while your competitors do not,” says Fischer, but you “don’t fully understand…the risk of what you’re giving up and how valuable it could be.”

One of the main concerns for Drummond is that AI companies are essentially letting shareholders take the wheel while consigning safety, accuracy, and accountability to the back seat. “They are not building them in pursuit of a better future,” she argues. “They are building them to beat the other guy. This is all about a race to build the most powerful models and to do it faster than the company next door. And so what that means is…using copywritten work; it means taking shortcuts; it means potentially degrading the accuracy and the value of the information that these models are spitting out simply to be first, be biggest, show a return on investment.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Fischer unpacks how media companies are bracing for the financial fallout of AI-driven search results, which many journalists fear could make reading actual articles unnecessary. “You’re seeing publishers, broadly speaking, really start to scramble to diversify their business models, with the anticipation that search traffic is going to go away. And it’s important to remember that this is happening on the heels of social traffic going away,” she explains. “Now most companies are putting subscriptions at their core. They are trying to reap more revenue from consumers directly…. The game is completely over for publishers on even trying to compete for any kind of efficiency advertising, and the advent of generative AI killing search—that’s like the real, true end.”

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