News Integrity in the Age of AI

The intellectual property of news organizations must be respected. Their expertise and content have the power to underpin the development of innovative technologies such as generative AI and they are ready to engage with technology companies to accelerate this process. To do so, there needs to be transparency on what content is being used.

Professional journalism and breaking news produced in multiple languages are critical to citizens and therefore must be sustainably funded. Technology companies must appropriately and fairly compensate the originator when using their content. This may or may not be a financial arrangement, but where content is used, relevant new or retrospective agreements must be reached.

The public needs to have the chance to evaluate the information they receive for themselves. Where news-related content is generated by AI tools, there must be transparency about which sources are being used, including citations in an agreed format with links to the original content. Accuracy is critical and distortion of journalistic content is unacceptable. There must be mechanisms for swift action to remove and correct erroneous content when it is associated with a news organization. As values-driven organizations, news media and technology companies should work together to help people navigate the media they consume. This may include appropriately marking synthetic content and using media provenance signals such as C2PA.

Citizens currently benefit from having access to a wide variety of trustworthy news sources. New technologies can build on this, by working with a range of public and private news organizations. Tools which use AI to increase audiences’ exposure to high quality journalism from different organizations and regions will be better tools. They will make everyone better informed and show the benefits of the responsible and reliable use of AI.