Why AI search tools pose an ‘existential threat’ to news publishers • FRANCE 24 English

Why AI search tools pose an ‘existential threat’ to news publishers • FRANCE 24 English

time now for scoop our weekly conversation on international media and the political and economic headwinds confronting the industry with trust in the press and dear it’s a critical eye on a critical profession [Music] they say print is dead they say TV is dying but today we’re asking if online journalism could be on life support news sites or publishers are fighting for their survival amid generative AI products like Google’s AI overviews it summarizes information extracted from various websites which do not receive compensation that summary is then prominently displayed at the top of the page while conventional search results are further down it launched just over one year ago in the United States and from the start there was concern about its impact possibly lead to less website traffic and in turn loss ad revenue since users might not visit the source website if you’re a smaller less reputable online resource it’s quite possible you may never appear as a source since the algorithm might be inclined to promote more established websites instead now fewer clicks on links means fewer ad dollars now earlier this month was the annual can line festival for creativity and advertising a swanky event in the south of France one of the talking points there was how global ad revenue over the past decade has doubled to $1 trillion a boom for many but not all a decade ago for every two pages Google extracted information from it sent one visitor to a publisher that ratio has shifted dramatically within the past 6 months from 6:1 to today’s 18:1 and open AI’s ratio jumping from 251 to 1,500 to1 look at Anthropic from 6,000 to1 to a staggering 60,000 to1 that data coming from Cloudflare’s CEO who says publishers face an existential threat and what I’m worried about why I’m wearing black today and motorcycle boots even though it’s like you know 32 degrees outside um is I don’t know if you can’t sell subscriptions and you can’t sell ads and you don’t get an ego hit from knowing that people are consuming your stuff why anyone’s going to create content the stakes are high for the fourth estate as trust increases in AI products critics say the likelihood of users clicking through links will continue to diminish citing similar web the Wall Street Journal wrote that quote “Praffic from organic search to Huff Post websites fell by just over half in the past 3 years and by nearly that much at the Washington Post.” This Wednesday The Atlantic published an article entitled The End of Publishing as We Know It: Inside Silicon Valley’s Assault on the Media and it said some have speculated that traffic drops resulting from chat bots were part of the reasons outlets such as Business Insider and the Daily Dot have recently had layoffs for more let’s speak to our guest Claudia Jesa a research associate at the TA Center for Digital Journalism hello to you Claudia thank you for patiently waiting um Google used to want to get users off its site as quickly as possible now it seems that these new tools are designed to keep them on the Google platform uh media executives are worried about what they call uh Google zero can you explain what that is hey yeah Google zero is something that has been looming for the last couple of years a fear in the journalism industry it’s a concept coined by the journalist Neil Patel for the moment where Google search stops sending traffic outside its search engine to third party websites and as you mentioned and in the clips that just preceded um Google is introducing AI overviews and AI mode and there’s a lot of new chat bots that have live search functionality and when you can ask a question as a user and get a summarized answer you are unlikely to then click through to the sources that are linked um and to fact check that information because the summary is already there and that really disrupts publishers relationship with their audiences and can have significant financial consequences for publishers that rely on click-through traffic to generate advertising revenue
uh last month you co-published a report along with Peter Brown uh it’s called Journalism Zero: How Platforms and Publishers Are Navigating uh AI can you take us through the main takeaways of this report sure so for this report we interviewed several dozen representatives from the news industry and the technology industry about the state of the relationship between those two industries and how AI is impacting on it and um given the relation the state of the relationship between those two industries over the last few years you know the withdrawal of Facebook and Google from uh news initiatives that they’ve had a lot of news organizations were more cautious around entering formal relationships with AI companies um we’ve seen the shrinking of journalism partnerships team teams at tech tech companies and a lot of publishers have decided to rep prioritize more uh stronger and sustainable relationships with their audiences through their own platforms such as through newsletters podcasts and other programming however we’re seeing now that AI companies really have a strong demand for fresh trustworthy content which is what news organizations produce and so some are wondering whether they their the approach that AI companies will have will be more respectful of news news organizations yeah and it’s very unclear moving forward um just just to help us sort of frame the discussion here um specifically with AI overviews I’ve seen a few figures but do you have any data on how much it has reduced traffic to outside websites we’re seeing a lot of different figures reported recently um broadly we know that there’s been sharp declines for a lot of independent publishers and independent websites from traditional search engines and we know that there’s a growing number of users who turn to chat bots for their searches things like chatbt and perplexity but those are only contributing to a very small portion um of visits to new sites and they’re not making up for the loss of traffic from Google and um as I mentioned before there’s a growing preference for zeroclick experiences so that is asking a question reading the summary and not going through and checking any of the sources that are cited
yeah and that that preference it also speaks to something else doesn’t it the more people use it the more people might trust it and as that trust goes up
that source material is visited less and less is that right am I drawing the right uh conclusion there that’s one one element of the problem um is just blindly trusting the answers which are not often we which we know um from various evidence that’s come out that those summaries are not often reliable um that there’s a tendency to quote unquote hallucinate um in different research that I’ve done that I’ve published in March we found that chatbots are also bad at declining to answer questions that they can’t uh answer accurately so they’ll offer in incorrect or speculative answers and we found that chatbots will also generate fabricated links or site syndicated or plagiarized copies of articles which means that even if an audience member or a user decides to click through and check the source um it might not be reliable as well
um this also isn’t happening in a vacuum is it google also being squeezed by its competition last month its search usage on Apple’s web browser declined for the first time in 22 years now now as the competition between these AI companies heats up your report also looks at the implications uh for publishers tell us a bit about that yeah so there’s been a lot of disruption in the search space we’re seeing a lot as I mentioned a lot of chatbots are adding live search functionality some chat bots or some AI companies that have chatbots are also releasing their own web browsers uh I believe recently Perplexity launched an AI enabled browser called Comet and so those web browsers and search engines create a lot of competition for Google and for Chrome which in the US is under a lot of regulatory scrutiny already and there’s when there’s so much competition there also is a mentality of move fast and break things and there’s not as much consideration of the user experience or the implications for publishers
yeah and publishers who are watching that competition it seems like they have one of two options either take legal action or cut a deal right so um over the last three or so years some AI companies have taken the move to approach news organizations and um sign content licensing agreements uh and uh or revenue share agreements so we’ve seen um several dozen of such agreements take place largely with American news organizations because a lot of these companies are American but we have seen um some similar moves in France lemon has a relationship with open AI and AFP has uh a formal relationship with Mistl which is a French chatbot um so that is one option but that is not available to most news organizations um it seems that uh the AI companies are prioritizing more national organizations and so the alternative for some is lawsuits uh over copyright infringement and we’ve seen such lawsuits in the US Canada and India um and then there’s the the third way for those who don’t have the resources uh to either engage in a formal content licensing agreement or a lawsuit is something called the robot exclusion protocol so um trying to block crawlers from AI companies that you’re not getting compensation from or who you might not trust to represent your content accurately but even this is not legally binding it’s just a page on a website where you can indicate um if you would like crawlers to not access your content but we’ve seen evidence that some AI companies appear to be circumventing even that protocol so it doesn’t leave a lot of publishers with a lot of options
yeah and I’m wondering about those publishers that don’t sign a deal that don’t seek legal action if if they don’t sign a deal with an AI company is there any idea what happens to the content will it be marginalized will it be put further below than the companies that do sign a deal any idea that’s a great question we’ve seen some evidence i think it varies by chatbot but we’ve some seen some evidence that for chat GPT for example publishers that have a licensing deal are more likely to have their content surfaced higher um in a search um there’s not I don’t have clear data on that but there’s a lot of questions right now around how to optimize for search so over the last two decades news organizations have done a lot to identify what keywords to include or how to represent their content in a way that makes it more likely to appear higher up in a Google search and so now there’s a lot of questions around what that means for chat bots and how they might change the presentation of their content so it’s more likely to appear and and to me it seems like a given that the tech industry would want a a news publisher uh if news publishers start going out of business won’t that make AI companies suffer too right because if there isn’t fresh content for users to engage with on the chat bots um then those tools become less useful for users and so I do think that there’s an opportunity here for news organizations to um play a bigger role in in chat bots and and demand more respect from the AI companies who rely so much on their content so I would love moving forward I would love to see more transparency from AI companies about how they choose media partners and greater recognition of the value of human reported journalistic content
yeah that’s a great note to end on claudia thank you so much claudia Jinska from the Toe Center for Digital Journalism thank you and that brings us to our quote of the week last month Google announced a new feature called AI mode which will allow users to interact with its search engine as if it were an AI chatbot as we’ve been discussing now following that announcement the head of the News Media Alliance Daniel Coffeeoffe said quote “Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return the definition of theft the DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company that’s it for this edition of Scoop thank you for watching and please stay tuned to France 24 [Applause] [Music]

AI Overview, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity: the list goes on. AI-powered tools are replacing Google searches and causing chaos among news publishers. AI summaries eliminate the need to click on blue links and as a result, traffic and ad revenue at some news sites have been plummeting. This week’s guest on FRANCE 24’s media show Scoop is Klaudia Jaźwińska, a researcher and journalist at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
#AI #journalism

🔔 Subscribe to France 24 now: https://f24.my/YTen
🔴 LIVE – Watch FRANCE 24 English 24/7 here: https://f24.my/YTliveEN

🌍 Read the latest International News and Top Stories: https://www.france24.com/en/

Like us on Facebook: https://f24.my/FBen
Follow us on X: https://f24.my/Xen
Bluesky: https://f24.my/BSen and Threads: https://f24.my/THen
Browse the news in pictures on Instagram: https://f24.my/IGen
Discover our TikTok videos: https://f24.my/TKen
Get the latest top stories on Telegram: https://f24.my/TGen