AI content in journalism should be paid for says Cloudfare CEO

The CEO of Cloudfare – a company that provides a variety of services to protect and speed up websites and other internet properties – Matthew Prince said this week at Web Summit that he is increasingly concerned at the use of journalistic content being used to train artificial intelligence models.

In particular the impact that new AI assisted browsers could have on the media business. “Imagine you are a media company with advertising on the pages. Some AI browsers are already acting on behalf of the user and visiting sites such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, reading all the articles of the day and then reusing that data, not only for the original user but for everyone else,” warned the CEO of Cloudflare — a US company with offices in Lisbon.

According to Prince, this practice “completely undermines the journalism business model” by taking from digital publications their main source of sustainability – paid access and direct reader traffic.

“Content creators should be paid for their work which is why it is vital to create a Code of Conduct Conduct with a set of clear rules so that those who respect them can operate easily and those who don’t come up against blocks.”