“We’re all trying to catch up to the greatest heist of intellectual property the world has ever seen.”
At a panel during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, Matt Rogerson, Guardian News and Media’s director of public policy, expressed dismay over how publishers have been treated by generative AI developers, and stressed the need for government and regulators to take action to support publishers and protect audiences from misinformation.
“This technology is not reliable,” Rogerson said. “Generative AI is a misbranding of the technology. It is not intelligent. It is a tool that extracts, and crawls lots of information, usually from journalists and without a commercial license to do so and then regurgitates that information in response to a query. It is not intelligent. It is not a journalist. It is not a human.”
In recent weeks, a number of publishers, including the BBC, have moved to restrict generative AI companies’ access to their webpages, disallowing them from crawling content to learn from and use.
In a blog post on 5…