Debate over whether Big Tech AI companies should compensate legacy media outlets has picked up steam on the left. The question: Should tech giants be allowed, or even required, to pay for content they are feeding their AI algorithms, or is this another Big Media cartel gambit?
Coming on the heels of President Donald Trump’s executive actions in furtherance of his recently announced AI Action Plan, arguments from the left about protecting “content creators” are resoundingly similar to a measure the left has deployed before. Only this time, it appears to be much worse.
As MRC Free Speech America has previously explained, the left — apparently understanding that requiring tech giants to enter into agreements to pay for content from legacy media outlets could violate the law — previously asked for an exemption to the Sherman Antitrust Act’s anti-competition enforcement for legacy media outlets. From the MRC piece:
“Not so long ago, politicians on the left argued that in order to preserve free speech we had to squash it. In doing so, they pushed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2022. This ‘media cartel bill’ would have created ‘a four-year safe harbor from antitrust laws for print, broadcast and digital news companies to allow news outlets to jointly negotiate payment terms for content distribution on social media.’”
But now, it appears those on the left have updated from Big Media cartel 1.0 to Big Media cartel 2.0, and they’ve even upped the ante.
With American society beginning to recognize and reject how the legacy media have failed to fairly and effectively cover the news, consumers are turning to new media sources like Big Tech aggregators and, even more recently, artificial intelligence chatbots.
And now the legacy media outlets and their tech giant partners have seemingly dispensed with any pretense of needing an exemption for anti-competitive practices altogether. Instead, the left appears to be arguing full-throatedly in favor of collusion in the form of contracts for content crawling as a way to prevent their imagined version of copyright infringement — and in some cases, perhaps even to induce Big Tech platforms to give preference to their content in AI responses while suppressing their competitors.
Trump AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, along with fellow podcast co-hosts and tech entrepreneurs Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg and Chamath Palihapitiya unpacked the situation from both sides of the discussion on a recent All-In Podcast (Episode 237).
During the show, Sacks echoed Trump, suggesting that in many cases, AI tech giants contracting for content from legacy media outlets and other content creators are not necessary because crawling publicly available content does not infringe on copyright.
(In legal terms, such agreements may be considered “illusory contracts.” An illusory contract, according to US Legal, is “an agreement between two parties where one party's promise lacks real substance or commitment. In these contracts, the consideration, which is the value exchanged, is so vague or insubstantial that it does not create any binding obligations. As a result, such contracts are typically unenforceable in a court of law.”)
Sacks, speaking from the Trump administration’s perspective, outlined the common sense approach to AI training and the need for the United States to beat communist China:
“Well, I think what the president said was just very pragmatic. He said we had to have a common sense approach towards intellectual property. And he said if you have to make a deal with every single article on the internet — every single website, every single book, every piece of IP — in order to train an AI model, it wasn’t feasible. … [I]f we require our AI models to do that, and China doesn’t, and they won’t. They’re just training on everything, whether it’s, you know, pirated or not, then we’re going to lose the AI race. So, I think he took the side of a fair use definition.”
Calacanis, making an emotional appeal and arguing the left’s perspective on AI training, complained that “the China fear” is unimportant. He suggested that American AI tech giants should not be allowed to “steal” in the same way that China does.
Sacks made clear that no such theft is taking place when AI models train on publicly available data. “I just want to be clear that nobody is losing their copyright,” Sacks said. “Copyright is the right not to have your work copied. And if an AI model produces outputs that copy or plagiarize your work, then that’s a violation of the law. And I think the president specifically said there. We’re not allowing copying or plagiarizing. The question is whether AI models are allowed to do math on the internet. You know, pattern recognition.”
Then came the kicker. Referencing a recent $20 million deal between Amazon AI and The New York Times, Calacanis argued that permitting AI companies to contract with legacy media outlets like The Times will give America a “distinct advantage”: It will “allow [legacy outlets like The Times] to hire more journalists,” and “fact checkers.” He continued, saying the quiet part out loud, “Then that protected site will have, be giving in real time, something these language models are going to have to go hack and steal. That real-time data is going to be a distinct advantage for Gemini, OpenAI, Amazon, whoever chooses to do it.”
Sacks then brought the issue home, calling out the left’s plan to bolster the legacy media at the expense of competition. “You have this crazy idea that we’re going to win the AI race by tying one hand behind our back so that you can subsidize journalists,” Sacks pointed out, “so you can subsidize The New York Times’s broken business model. It’s insane.”
Sacks gets it. America can’t afford to march into the new digital era with a hand tied behind its back and with the legacy media receiving subsidies from their tech giant partners to force-feed the free world the left’s jaded, anti-American ideology. MRC will continue to ferret out purveyors of bias and viewpoint discrimination with data and facts that point to the truth.
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