News Corp boss warns AI companies not spending enough on content
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Robert Thomson, speaking at The Times Tech Summit, is leading the charge for the media industry with a ‘woo or sue’ approach to intellectual property rights
Robert Thomson, the boss of News Corp, has warned that AI companies are making a “fundamental miscalculation” by not spending enough on content.
Speaking in an interview as part of The Times Tech Summit held on Tuesday, Thomson asserted that data should be valued on a par with the tens of billions of dollars that AI developers have been spending on infrastructure, such as chips and data centres.
The information that goes into creating the technology is “the essence of AI,” the chief executive of The Times’ parent company said, because tech companies “need news to keep the AI engines fresh and so that immediacy that a news organisation can provide is essential to them”.
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In addition, the strength of creativity and intellectual property rights in the US gives the country an advantage over technological rivals such as China, which it needs to protect, Thomson said.
Copyright has become one of the most contentious issues of the AI era, as creators have seen their information used without permission.
Artists and writers such as Elton John, Lord Lloyd Webber, Sir Stephen Fry and Sir Paul McCartney have all spoken out on the issue.
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Thomson has led the charge for the media industry, adopting what he calls a “woo or sue” approach, agreeing licensing deals with some, such as OpenAI, and taking those who do not respect intellectual property rights to court.
While he would not confirm the value of the deal with the ChatGPT maker, it is reportedly worth $250 million over five years.
Along with a group of other publishers as part of a class action suit, News Corp, the owner of HarperCollins, recently won a $1.5 billion settlement from Anthropic over claims that it used millions of pirated books to train its AI chatbot, Claude.
While winning such cases is clearly valuable, Thomson said, the value of litigation also lies in the disclosure of information because it created transparency, which leads to greater accountability.
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These systems are designed by humans and so their outcomes, whether intended or not, remain the responsibility of those who created and deployed them, he said.
“We can’t allow this sensibility to prevail where companies are saying: ‘Oh, actually you can’t blame us because we don’t know exactly how it works’”.
“Ultimately it’s up to every news organisation to stand up for its rights,” Thomson concluded, “to be very aware of what’s going on and to have a sophisticated dialogue with these companies, because these are sophisticated companies”.
The media needs to keep improving, he explained, “because being on the defensive is not a winning strategy”.
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