I’ve just started using Perplexity’s Discover news application and have to say it is impressive, compiling multiple news reports on a topic and producing a well-organized summary and explanation, giving users the opportunity to query the topic — and providing citations and links to news stories (revealing, by the way, just how repetitive they are). See this example on the Pope and AI.
Perplexity is doing to news organizations what news organizations have long done to their sources, which should make journalists reconsider their relationship with information and public need. Should.
Journalists have, predictably, started screaming bloody murder, crying that the AI company is stealing and repurposing their valuable content. (I am amused it is Forbes leading this charge given that it has long since become a joke; I confess to laughing out loud every time I encounter its paywall. But it does have some good staff reporting among contributors’ output and the story at hand about military drones is one example.)
I’ve been asking lately what happens if the web is destroyed by all of media’s clickbait and now AI’s endless copies of it. And what if the web is superseded should chat and soon AI’s agents become primary means of discovery of information? Will authoritative news sources then need to make themselves discoverable through AI — as they had to through search and social? By that I don’t mean make deals with OpenAI, et al (Springer’s, Murdoch’s, Diller’s, The Atlantic’s, and others’ money grabs are not about licensing content but instead about selling their silence in lobbying and PR). Rather, I’ve been suggesting the news industry as a whole should look at creating an API for news and negotiating terms: payment, credit, links. See, for example, Tollbit; see also Norwegian media banding together to build a native-language LLM.
All this is making me ask questions about the role of news media in the larger information ecosystem. What I’m about to discuss is basic media and communication theory, but the current row over Perplexity puts it in a new light, for it makes me see how news media have played precisely the same role with source information that Perplexity is playing with them.
News media insist on looking at this new reality from their perspective, as content creators and copyright holders. But now that the shoe is on the robot’s foot, let’s look at it the other way around, from the perspective of original sources of information, research, content, creativity, opinion, and art — and from the perspective of the public: individuals and communities that need or want access to all that. Since the birth of the newspaper in 1605 (see my Gutenberg Parenthesis), everyone who has wanted to reach the public has had to go through the gatekeepers of media. Today the gatekeepers of media have to go through the new gatekeepers of search, social, and AI. Who is adding value and who is adding friction?
Take, for example, Becca Rothfeld’s excellent review of John Ganz’ new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, in The Washington Post. From The Post’s perspective, it did Ganz and his publisher, FSG, a huge favor, covering the book and even linking to it (through which both The Post and its owner profit every time a copy is bought).
If Ganz and FSG thought like news organizations do when confronted with Perplexity, they would be in their rights to complain that Rothfeld took Ganz’ ideas, reporting, and research and repurposed it for the purpose of creating her essay, while the paper profited through advertising and audience attention and subscription. They would also, as newspapers do, ignore the value of citation and links.
So The Post does to a content creator what news organizations complain Perplexity does to them. This is what news organizations have long done to authors, scientists, researchers, experts, theorists, and people who have useful experiences or ideas: extract, repurpose, and exploit. How’s it feel, guys, now that it’s being done to you?
Now, of course, Ganz wants to be discovered and not just to sell books but also to have his ideas spark larger public discourse. So it is a bargain I am sure he is more than willing to make. He and FSG have something to sell.
But what of the people who simply have information that may be relevant and valuable to others and see their ideas, research, or experience taken and used by news media (often misshapen in the process)? Once sources speak to a reporter, they lose control of what they have to say. More than that, the reporter then asserts ownership of the result. The reporter now claims it as “my content” and cries when other reporters rewrite it without credit (to the reporter; nevermind the source) and when search and social quote it (while linking to it, for the benefit of the news organization). They are complaining now when Perplexity reads, summarizes, and links to their articles. Their publishers are not only suing AI companies but also lobbying for legislation to extend copyright and diminish fair use when it comes to technology.
Note well that copyright at its birth in the 1710 Statute of Anne did not cover newspapers and magazines. In its suit against Open AI, The New York Times claims that “since our nation’s founding, strong copyright protection has empowered those who gather and report news to secure the fruits of their labor and investment.” That is simply false. The US Copyright Act of 1790 protected only books, maps, and charts. Newspapers and magazines did not fall under copyright’s purview until the Copyright Act of 1909. As I explain in The Gutenberg Parenthesis [hey, I, too, want to be discovered and sell books; discount codes are here] the Postal Office Act of 1792 enabled newspaper publishers to trade copies through the mails for free to allow them to share stories — leading to the creation of the wonderful job title of “scissors editor” — with the explicit intent of creating a national network for news and with it, a nation. As I explain here, even in the infamous hot news decision favoring the Associated Press, the Supreme Court refused to grant a property right to news.
Yet newspapers act as if news, information, ideas, and opinions are their property as content. No, they merely borrow it to exploit it for their own purposes, locking it behind their paywalls to sell subscriptions and using it to attract and sell attention to advertisers.
How dare Perplexity do unto them as they have done unto others?
Now, before you @ me, let me make clear that I well understand the need to support journalists and their reporting. I spent a good deal of my career in the industry and the academe exploring business strategies. Journalism is a public necessity.
But the real necessity is an informed and educated public. That means that authoritative, expert, useful, and relevant information needs to get to the public with as little friction as possible. Today, though, every effort is going into increasing friction: paywalls, link taxes, demands to take content down, and flooding the zone of good information with bad information: propaganda, spam, and clickbait.
Am I suggesting that news should be a public utility? No. That is an impossibility given that news should operate on the public’s behalf to check power, not to lobby for favors from it. I believe that whatever we come to think of as journalism in the future must coexist in private for-profit and not-for-profit entities alongside technology, also in private but one hopes open entities.
And what is this journalism of the future? I cannot yet say. Our envisioning of it must begin not with concern for the claims of property rights to information. It must start instead with rethinking how best to make information available to the public: not to the imagined mass (that deformed creature I decry in The Gutenberg Parenthesis) but instead to each of us as individuals and members of communities.
Perplexity Discover is a nice presentation of news, richer and more compelling and convenient (because it brings much together) than Google News or even, dare I say, a newspaper. (“Reading a newspaper,” said Benedict Anderson, “is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.”) I haven’t used Discover long enough to come to conclusions about it. And as it is generated by AI, I have no doubt it is filled with errors and thus is unreliable and unusable as a primary source of news. None of this is intended as a recommendation to switch one’s news diet to Perplexity.
But this moment does provide the opportunity to rethink the architecture of our news and information ecosystems. The goal should not be to support legacy institutions and their ways. The goal must be to improve the means by which quality, credible information is made available to the benefit of individuals and communities in the public and to the credit of the sources of that information. Intermediaries — whether newspapers or search engines or social platforms or AI companies — must add value or get the hell out of the way.
(I asked Google Gemini, atop this post, and Meta.ai, here, to draw me a pyramid with “you, Intermediaries, and sources.” These are the results. AGI is nowhere near.)
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