David Harvey reports that AI scraping could wind up being part of the revised NZ Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.
Having defined what an AI system and an AI service is the Bill goes on goes on to link an AI system to news content for the purpose of training the AI system.
The focus is upon the way in which news content may be used to train a digital platform or AI system.
The first element is that an AI system must be trained using news content. This links to the definition of news content in the Bill. The training must generate outputs which happens if the AI system enables or facilitates the generation of outputs.
He continues through with technical elements on whether the definitions work and whatnot.
The better underlying question seemed to be why anyone thinks there's a problem here to be solved.
It's simple for a website to restrict against scraping. It would similarly be simple for a news site to licence its content for AI training, if anyone wanted to pay them enough to allow it. There is no obvious reason government needs to be involved in any of this.
But there's a fun potential antitrust angle, and then conflicting priorities. It looks like Google has licensed Reddit content for AI training, and that part of the deal might mean that Google is now the only search engine that works on Reddit.
Reddit wouldn't have set an exclusivity deal unless the exclusivity deal gave it more money than licensing its content to multiple agents.
Government-types have claimed to be deeply worried about news sites not being able to adequately monetise content, with consequences then for the public good aspects of journalism. And they've tried to punt the bill over to tech platforms rather than just fund a public good out of public funds.
Here we have a news content site that has made a voluntary deal with a platform for content access for AI scraping - the very thing that NZ's Parliament seems to want to legislate to force - and folks are worried that the exclusivity arrangements that mean more money for the news sites also give the platform too much power.
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I'm not saying there aren't potential competition issues here. But there are trade-offs. Ban exclusivity arrangements and you'll reduce the amount of money going to news content providers, and then you'll have other parts of government looking for convoluted ways to force additional payments.
Dr Eric Crampton is Chief Economist at the New Zealand Initiative. This article was first published HERE
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