The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday, April 14, edition that Canadian researchers emphasize that future legislation balancing Big Tech and journalism must consider generative artificial intelligence. A Canadian Press dispatch to The Globe reports that a recent report on Canada's Online News Act highlights that the focus is shifting from platforms to AI chatbots in the news industry's fight for fairness and compensation. McGill University's Sophia Crabbe-Field says, "More and more people are going to chatbots to get information and these chatbots are probably not necessarily going to be citing news organizations." By interviewing media and tech experts and looking at other research and news reports, the McGill investigators concluded AI companies are scrambling for high-quality content to train their models, which has led them to news outlets and their content.
In most cases, news outlets never provided express permission for their output to be gobbled up by tech companies, pushing most publishers to want compensation. Ms. Crabbe-Field says, "It's hard to assign a clear dollar sign to news because it is a public good, so it can't necessarily be something that we convert just into a dollar amount."
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