Home » Nine’s Mike Sneesby Wants To Expand News Media Bargaining To Protect Against AI

15 May, 2023

Nine’s Mike Sneesby Wants To Expand News Media Bargaining To Protect Against AI

Nine boss Mike Sneesby has told an internal staff forum that the company will push for payments from AI companies that have trained their systems on entertainment and news content.

Sneesby said that expensive Australian journalism and entertainment risked being exploited by AI companies.

“That really isn’t greatly different to the challenge that we have today with Google and Facebook and other social media platforms that already are generating value from our content,” Sneesby told his colleagues in Melbourne last Tuesday, according to the Nine-owned Sydney Morning Herald.

“I think it’s very important that we continue to work closely with the government around expanding that view of news media bargaining into a broader content, not just text and images, but also audio, video, and any form of intellectual property that we create.”

News Corp executive chairman Michael Miller has also called for AI firms to remunerate news and entertainment sites for training models using their content.

“OpenAI has, for example, quickly established a business worth US$30 billion by using others’ original content and creativity without remuneration and attribution,” he said.

“Creators deserve to be rewarded for their original work being used by AI engines which are raiding the style and tone of not only journalists but (to name a few) musicians, authors, poets, historians, painters, filmmakers and photographers. It is feasting on their creativity.”

Robert Thomson, News Corp’s chief executive also told investors during an earnings call that “Our content will certainly be aggregated and synthesised [by AI], and those answers monetised by other parties.

“We expect our fair share of that monetisation. Generative AI cannot be degenerative AI.”

The news media bargaining code has forced the large tech platforms to enact commercial partnerships with Australia’s media companies to pay them for the content they use.

Earlier this year, Meta described the code as “an untidy and short-term compromise.”

Microsoft, which has incorporated technology from ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, told the SMH that it was “supportive” of the bargaining code and the “efforts and look forward to engaging in the policy conversations as they evolve around AI and journalism.”

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