Ex-ACCC boss Rod Sims calls for AI models like ChatGPT to pay for news
According to Rod Sims, the former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, AI models such as Google’s Bard and Microsoft-linked ChatGPT should be made to pay for access to content, just like Australia's news bargaining code moved over $200 million from Google and Facebook to publishers of journalism. Large AI models like these have likely scraped news publications to generate accurate answers, raising major copyright concerns. Mr Sims believes this puts them in line for designation under the bargaining code.
Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp, has been making proactive calls for AI firms to pay for access to content. Meanwhile, The Guardian has created a global AI working group, and Nine, the publisher of The Australian Financial Review, is exploring how AI can be applied across other areas of a media business.
Media executives are raising concerns Google and Microsoft may have harvested news stories to build these AI models under agreements used to index content for a search engine, which could have competition implications. The Washington Post published a list of 10 million websites used to build one chatbot dataset, with 13% of content coming from "news and media."
According to Mr Sims, the bargaining code allows for new companies to be added, which means they could be "designated", depending on their bargaining power in the market, and there is scope to add more companies to the list of those that can be designated by the government.
Since the first iteration of the media bargaining code was legislated, media companies have called for other platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Google-owned YouTube, and Meta-owned Instagram to be added to the list of firms forced to negotiate.
