Australia’s largest media company says it will adopt a “human-centric” approach to integrating AI technology into its operations.
Nine has set out five principles on how it plans to incorporate AI technology into its operations, including journalism.
The TV, radio and newspaper group said that it will unveil a formal AI strategy in the 2025 financial year, but is exploring how the technology can make its business more efficient and its content “easier to produce and distribute”.
Although short on detail, Nine said that its people will continue to take responsibility for the work and content they produce irrespective of the role AI can play.
Nine plans to “critically examine AI-generated output and automated decision-making for accuracy and fairness” while acknowledging that AI large language models can ”be biassed” and “hallucinate”.
Nine said it will “build, train and tune models in a closed Nine environment, ensuring the models and data are protected, secured and confidential”.
Interestingly, Nine said that it is open to entering into commercial agreements with “Large Language Model (LLM) platform owners and other software vendors to licence the use of our content”.
This suggests Nine could follow the lead of News Corp and other media companies by allowing LLMs such as ChatGPT developer OpenAI to train its models on Nine’s content for a fee.
The industry is divided on whether media companies should cash in and embrace generative AI technology to scrape its content at the risk the increased use of LLMs could bypass traffic to news websites and the advertising revenue that comes with it.
To date, News Corp, Vox Media, The Axel Springer Group (which publishers Business Insider and Politico) and the FT Group have struck commercial deals with GenAI developers to open up their content (which is often behind a paywall) to train LLMs.
News Corp signed a five-year deal with OpenAI that is reportedly valued at as much as $250 million in cash and OpenAI credits.
The New York Times has take a different tack, suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement after negotiations with the tech firms broke down.
Media companies are eyeing AI technology to more efficiently carry out tasks that are commonly carried out by journalists, marketers and other tasks.
In Australia, the three largest media companies, Nine, Seven West Media and News Corp, have made wide sweeping redundancies due to a declining advertising market and lost income from Meta’s news media bargaining code content deals.
