On Tuesday February 25, something happened in the newspaper world that I’ve not seen before, writes Lucy Stephens.
The UK media – every national title and many regionals – carried the same front page.
Of course, over the years there have been several occasions when many newspapers splashed the same story on the front.
The destruction of the Twin Towers. The death of Princess Diana.
But that was about the top story of the day dominating the news.
This was different.
The ‘Make it Fair’ campaign saw wraparound ads run by virtually every title in the UK on the same day. News-stands across the land were a sea of the campaign’s blue, white and black colour scheme, making a striking visual impact as well as a verbal one.
The campaign called on The Government to make tech firms pay creators fairly for use of their content to train AI developers, with Whitehall proposing to relax copyright laws to facilitate this new ‘AI moment’ in the UK.
Various key figures in the music industry, such as Kate Bush, are voicing similar concerns over the impact on their world.
It was a united front from the newspaper industry whose very future could well be inextricably tied up with the Government’s much vaunted plans to make the UK an ‘AI superpower’.
The proposed changes put the burden on content producers such as newspapers to opt out of use of their content for AI data mining. Currently, under copyright law, either a journalist or a publisher owns the rights to their articles, and it is generally illegal to copy or distribute these without permission.
Copyright has protected journalists and other creators for a long time. Now they are arguing that allowing AI developers to use their content without their knowledge is effectively stealing.
It’s important to stress that the Make it Fair campaign – and for that matter, this blog – is not a protest against the advance of AI per se. Penguin PR co-director Sarah Newton wrote persuasively in this blog space a few weeks back that AI should be seen not as a threat, but a tool. (LINK)
I found the campaign interesting because, as I have said, it’s the first time I’ve known newspapers to make a united stand like this.
Newspaper groups are fierce competitors and when you’re working in one, you really don’t want the editor coming up to your desk and saying: “Can you write something on this story in – holds up rival newspaper – that (pointed cough) we seem to have missed?”
I could never quite fathom why in some cases we would be writing a story that other papers had run, only for an editor on another day to say: “Well I’m not running it if – holds up rival newspaper – (pointed cough): they have.”
In terms of what newspapers are trying to achieve in their Make it Fair campaign, it’ll be interesting to see what happens now.
The concept of AI strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human: to have ideas, to decide in what order to write a news story, to choose the inspiration for a song, to be creative.
While AI is a clever amassing tool it can only work with material that is already out there. It’s a vast library, albeit one that may learn to write some of the books it stores.
Creativity is about the spark of the new. But like everything, creativity and the art of journalism needs money in order to survive. If content is available for free, the fear is that the purse strings will be taken from creative industries and we’ll all be left with a much duller world, and possibly a much less reliable one too.
All I’m saying is that when the bitterest newspaper rivals present a united front, even for a day, we should at least listen to what they are saying.
