Media, Democracy, and Generative AI: A Critical Juncture

Report by Anna Colom, Elena Murray, and Marta Poblet: “On the diagnosis side, our review identifies multiple, interconnected challenges. Namely: Generative AI providers scrape journalistic content at massive scale while returning negligible traffic or compensation. AI bot traffic also imposes disproportionate infrastructure strain, which is even harder for smaller organisations to cope with. Meanwhile, although exact figures on declining traffic vary, ‘zero-click’ searches are diverting audiences away from publishers. Together, these trends endanger the business models of news organisations, already walking on thin ice following the platformisation initiated by social media companies. Likewise, opacity in Generative AI models and outputs, inherent errors in both content accuracy and attribution, the limitations of Generative AI to summarise journalistic content in context-specific and nuanced ways, and the bypassing of original sources and editorial gatekeepers risk undermining the integrity of information as a key pillar for democracy. The growing concentration of Generative AI power in a few hands, as well as concentration in ways information is generated (with English-centric and large national media favoured over more local or diverse sources), further erodes pluralism, equity, and diversity…(More)”.