AI is not capable of keeping city hall accountable

• By Mary Ellen Klas / Bloomberg Opinion

• • Add TT as Preferred Source

  • 

  • 

  • 

If artificial intelligence (AI) has not finished off your local newspaper yet, just wait. It will. OpenAI, the company that built ChatGPT, has called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers.

Americans do not fully appreciate what that means. We are overdue for a serious conversation — and a tech reckoning.

Just more than a week ago, McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald — my former employer — announced it was laying off more than 90 journalists across 17 of its publications, including one-third of the Herald’s staff.

The cuts followed similar mass reductions this year at the Washington Post, Lee Enterprises and the Associated Press. Other local news organizations have closed altogether.

McClatchy blamed subscriber economics and a 41 percent decline in consumer revenue over the past five years, but there is more to the story. McClatchy is owned by Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund. In June, as McClatchy was bleeding revenue, executives announced a massive investment in AI-generated content. AI agents would repackage the work of its reporters and affix their bylines to work they had not written — all in an effort to drive traffic.

What they did not say is that for the past three years, AI has been capsizing the industry’s business model. News organizations had shifted their focus to generating Web traffic following a 92 percent decline of print ad revenues between 2000 and 2023. With the emergence of AI, tech companies decided they could stop directing traffic to news sites and supplant them altogether by stealing and regurgitating their journalism.

It might be “the largest theft of labor in human history,” Microsoft’s director of applied science Brent Hecht said in company communications unsealed in a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI by the New York Times and other news organizations.

The newspapers alleged that tech firms have been bypassing news site paywalls and scraping content to train their large language models since 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and creating products that replace the news sites. Microsoft and OpenAI said that their use of copyright material constitutes “fair use” and that they alter the content enough to shield them from liability for infringement.

What is especially troubling — but perhaps not surprising — is that according to the unsealed documents, the tech industry executives understood there would be a cost to creating a product that substituted for the original work of journalists, but they proceeded anyway.

“Almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use,” Hecht said.

One Microsoft policy document acknowledged the risk succinctly: Generative AI “destroys its supply chain.”

Now, consider what that “supply chain” produces and what we lose when it is gone.

On the same day McClatchy gave the Charlotte Observer’s two investigative reporters the pink slip, the paper published a deeply disturbing investigation by one of them into a local log cabin company accused of defrauding customers. The chain slashed the Idaho reporter who exposed a hospital for covering up the injury record of a surgeon. The Miami Herald dismissed a city hall reporter who broke story after story of conflict and corruption. The Lexington Herald-Leader jettisoned the entire team covering city and Kentucky state government.

McClatchy eliminated dozens of jobs of veteran reporters who covered school boards, county commissions and the environment. It laid off editorial writers, gutted positions dedicated to Spanish-language readers and axed some of the chain’s hardest-working sports reporters.

None of these journalists did their job for the pay. Many barely made enough to cover their mortgages. However, despite the growing distrust of national media — fueled by a dysfunctional social media environment and polarized politics — local reporting can be one of the most gratifying jobs in journalism. Good reporters can explain confusing issues, elevate the voices of the powerless, hold the powerful to account and bring simple joy by posting Little League box scores and write-ups of homegrown businesses. When a community loses those reporters, it loses its connective tissue.

Losing that connective tissue also hurts democracy. Studies showed that when people rely less on local news sources and more on social media for information, they become more vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation — and more isolated. As political information becomes more nationalized, voter polarization increases, election turnout plummets and civic engagement falls. When there are no reporters covering government officials, they are more likely to engage in wasteful spending.

Local nonprofit news sites are filling some of those gaps, and organizations such as Rebuild Local News are working to sustain community journalism. One of its most promising ideas is a statewide tax credit awarded to eligible news organizations to fund the salaries of local reporters. Six states have adopted the policy. California lawmakers are the latest to pass it, and the proposal is awaiting the approval of California Governor Gavin Newsom. He should sign it.

However, tech companies should not get off the hook, either. They should be required to pay for every bit of intellectual property they have stolen from publishers without compensation, because without reporters, how are their AI agents going to get new intelligence? Make it up?

Local newspapers as we know them are dying, but local journalism is not. Our communities — and even our democracy — depend on keeping it alive.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.