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AI Needs Us More Than We Need It
Without a constant stream of high-quality, human-made information, artificial intelligence models become useless. That’s why journalists and other content creators have more leverage over the future than they might know.
Over the summer, journalists at Wired documented how Perplexity.ai, a free AI-powered search engine, surreptitiously scraped their content and other publishers like Forbes despite explicit instructions in both code and their terms of service prohibiting its crawlers and unauthorized uses by third parties. A NewsGuard investigation recently found, for example, that the top 10 chatbots have a propensity to repeat false narratives on topics in the news and to mimic Russian propaganda, reflecting the scale and scope of Russia’s historic and ongoing state-sponsored information operations. Authors, publishers, photo and music agencies, entertainers, and ordinary users have tried to fight back, filing more than two dozen lawsuits against the AI companies at the forefront of what one plaintiff characterized as “systematic theft on a mass scale.” But these will take years to resolve, if ever.
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