Japanese newspaper publishers say a growing number of AI-based services are using their content without permission, which impairs their function as news organizations. What do you think?

How does it impair their ability to function? If AI is sending out their news, they are getting more coverage. Seems to me they are getting free advertising.

If AI is sending out their news, they are getting more coverage. Seems to me they are getting free advertising.

That's not how sports broadcasters see Internet streams that let you watch the football, boxing etc. for free. Or how the movie industry sees torrents. Through product placement, movies include adverts.

$$$$$$ as always.

How does it impair their ability to function? If AI is sending out their news, they are getting more coverage. Seems to me they are getting free advertising.

Free advertising to do what? if the full content is being copied by AI there is no point in people going anywhere else, including the original source of that content.

How does it impair their ability to function?

It takes away viewers, which lowers the ad rates that can be charged. Less income to professional reporting means fewer, qualified, reporters. We've seen the same effect from Social networks stealing content without compensating the team that originated that content.

The number of news organizations, including newspapers has been reduced at least 50% in the last 40 yrs. Call it "failure to compete." The world used to get a newspaper every day and read it throughout the day, starting with the headlines with their morning coffee, going deeper on their commute to work, and have lighter reading at lunch or during work breaks to shift their mind from work topics to other topics. It was good for our brains and made us more productive.

Then newspaper subscriptions became something the next generation chose not to get. Saving trees. The news organizations had to move their content online since that was how the next generation wanted to have their news delivered. Initially, they followed the free model with advertising to have as many readers as possible. Online news that charged money and had paywalls quickly died. Very few online news organizations had the reputation to support paywalled readers. My local news begs for donations every few weeks. They've tried free with advertising. They've tried paywalled reading. Even with 1M local people, they can't raise $5000/month in any way. That's not enough to have even 1 full-time reporter doing everything.

AI vendors take advantage of free content. These small newspapers don't have the expertise to block outside crawlers/scanners from stealing their content. I've had the same issue with my websites. They are crawled by AI engines about 6x a day. When I say "crawled", I mean they hit every single page, even those that haven't changed in 10 yrs. Over 90% of all the costs to run my websites is wasted by AI crawlers. Bandwidth might seem free, but it isn't.

15 yrs ago, the crawlers were google, yahoo, yandex, baidu and a bunch of university research "bots" eating the bandwidth. Be cause we don't do 1 paragraph articles, those old-style crawlers would actually send readers our way - - well, most of them did except baidu, which has never, ever, ever, sent any referrals. Not once. Additionally, baidu didn't honor the robots.txt file, which says where to crawl and how fast to crawl. This is a well-known standard for all websites.

Crawlers that don't send any referrals and don't honor the robots.txt instructions are parasites, just like AI crawlers are parasites. They take, but provide nothing in return.

And that's the problem with AI crawlers and other bots. The source of the information needs to still get paid and not have their content stolen, like a "lost generation auntie finding a low-cost deal in a grocery store."