The US government has noted the potential negative impacts of generative AI on areas like journalism and content creation. Senator Amy Klobuchar joined seven Democrat colleagues to urge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice to investigate generative AI products like ChatGPT for potential antitrust violations, they wrote in a press release.
“Recently, several major online platforms have introduced new generative AI features that answer user queries by summarizing or, in some cases, simply repeating online content from other sources or platforms,” the letter states. “The introduction of these new generative AI features further threatens the ability of journalists and other content creators to receive compensation for their important work.”
The legislators further noted that traditional search results direct users to publishers’ websites while AI-generated summaries keep users on the search platform “where that platform alone can profit from user attention through advertising and data collection.”
The fact that AI can scrape news sites and then not even direct users to the original source could be “exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition that violates antitrust laws,” the lawmakers concluded. (That’s in addition to being a potential violation of copyright laws, but that’s another legal battle entirely.)
Lawmakers have already proposed a few bills designed to protect artists, journalists and others from unauthorized generative AI use. In July, three senators introduced the COPIED Act to combat and monitor the rise of AI content and deepfakes. Later in the month, a group of senators introduced the NO FAKES Act, a law that would make it illegal to digitally recreation a person’s voice or likeness without their consent.
AI poses a major risk to journalism, both local and global, because it removes sources of revenue that allow for original and investigative reporting. For example, the New York Times cited examples of ChatGPT providing users with “almost verbatim excerpts” from paywalled articles. OpenAI has recently admitted that it is impossible to train generative AI without copyrighted material.