News publishers under ‘grave threat’ from AI, Oireachtas committee to hear

DCM Editorial Summary: This story has been independently rewritten and summarised for DCM readers to highlight key developments relevant to the region. Original reporting by Irish Times, click this post to read the original article.

Irish news publishers are under “grave threat” from artificial intelligence (AI), the Oireachtas committee on AI is set to hear on Tuesday.

NewsBrands, the national news publishers’ body, is expected to tell the committee that the “harvesting [of] original reporting to feed LLMs” is putting the financial stability of quality journalism under “existential threat”, according to opening statements seen by The Irish Times. LLMs (large language models) are designed to understand, process and generate human-like text.

“Publishers in Ireland are now under grave threat. As a result, so too is truth, so too is democracy,” Sammi Bourke, the chairwoman of NewsBrands Ireland, is expected to say.

NewsBrands is to appear at the joint Oireachtas committee on Tuesday, alongside representatives of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Media Literacy Ireland.

Bourke is expected to inform the Oireachtas members that the meeting is “timely” and that the “actions and decisions taken now will determine whether AI strengthens our democratic institutions or quietly destroys them”.

The committee is set to hear that news publishers are being undermined by “big tech platforms, AI and changes in audience habits” and that generative AI has been trained on copyrighted journalism.

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“Gen AI is powered by journalism it refuses to pay for. By harvesting original reporting to feed LLMs, the financial viability of quality journalism is under existential threat,” Bourke is set to state.

She is to warn that should journalism become financially unsustainable, the impact will be “weaker scrutiny of power, greater exposure to disinformation and misinformation, and declining public trust in democratic institutions”.

The opening statement of the body, which represents national news publishers including The Irish Times, the Business Post and the Irish Farmers Journal, says it has had “little support from Government to assert its ownership of original content” and calls for funding to “drive innovation in the widest sense while preserving our independence”.

In the NUJ’s opening statement, Séamus Dooley, assistant general secretary, is to tell the committee: “AI is not an impending threat but a presence across our industry.”

He is set to state that “false attributions, inaccurate AI-generated stories, and creators discovering use of their work without consent or compensation” are already taking place and that it “erodes public trust in journalism and risks the reputation of every journalist and media organisation seeking to adhere to ethical standards”.

Dooley will call for “fair and reasonable terms of compensation” for journalists and creators whose work has been used without consent by AI companies, and for a licensing system for the use of their copyright materials.

“Tech companies should be obliged to disclose their training data, the design of their algorithms and their output, and pay their fair share for the wholescale theft of creative workers’ labour.”

At the committee, the NUJ will be represented by Dooley as well as Gerard Cunningham, the chair of the NUJ’s Dublin freelance branch. NewsBrands will be represented by Bourke, of the Irish Farmers Journal, and vice-chairwoman Deirdre Veldon of the Irish Times Group. Eileen Culloty and Martina Chapman will represent Media Literacy Ireland.

The NUJ and NewsBrands confirmed the authenticity of the opening statements.