Why publishers must act now to protect content from AI scrapers
Digiday ·
Nick Worth, CEO, Piano
Each technology wave brings the same promise: reach, relevance and a seat at the table. When the web arrived, publishers posted content to gain exposure, then spent a decade trying to claw back the revenue they gave away. When social media arrived, publishers threw open their archives to platforms that captured attention, data and advertising dollars. But each wave has left publishers with lower revenues, smaller newsrooms and a greater dependence on big tech platforms.
AI is the latest and potentially most disruptive wave. AI companies have spent four years crawling the web at industrial scale, ingesting decades of journalism to train models that answer questions directly instead of sending readers back to the source. Content that publishers built and funded is being taken without permission, compensation or attribution. AI companies have little incentive to pay while they can access publisher content for free.
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