Mother Jones illustration; Samuel Corum/Pool/CNP/ZUMA; OpenAI
The other day I asked ChatGPT about a political moment I’ll never forget: “What was the 47 percent story about?” Its answer:
The “47 percent story” refers to a controversial comment made by Mitt Romney, who was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election. In a private fundraising event that was secretly recorded and later leaked to the media, Romney stated that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government support, believe they are victims entitled to benefits, and consequently, would vote for then-President Barack Obama.
That’s accurate as far as it goes. But there’s one glaring omission: any reference to Mother Jones, which uncovered the story that reshaped that election cycle. The summary contained no links or citations to our reporting. You’d have thought it all sprang fully formed from the AI’s, uh, head.
I asked some follow-up questions and ChatGPT spit out lots more details about the story, including lengthy quotes from the video. The whole thing took maybe 20 seconds.
By contrast, it took David Corn, our Washington bureau chief, months to get the scoop. Digging into the candidate’s background in the hedge-fund world, David tracked speeches in which Romney had bragged about investments that exported American jobs overseas. Eventually, that led him to the secret video, at which point David and a team in our newsroom spent weeks verifying the content, reporting out additional context, and working out ways to present it to the public while protecting his sources.
Just as not all communities are rolling over for data centers, not all newsrooms are sitting back and letting AI steal our content. Some of us are fighting back.
OpenAI, of course, didn’t do any reporting to create its summary. They simply hoovered up the text of the story to help train ChatGPT to talk like a human. We know this because in its early versions, OpenAI listed the sources of its data (something it has since clammed up about), and in those datasets, we found tens of thousands of our stories.
OpenAI never asked for permission to use our work, nor did they offer to pay a licensing fee. Not then, when they were building their business, and not now when they are getting ready for an initial public offering that may end up around $1 trillion. Nor, so far as we know, did OpenAI ask for permission or a license from the countless other publishers, writers, creators, or internet posters (including, perhaps, you) whose intellectual property they ingested.
It’s not that one of the most valuable companies in the world can’t afford to pay. They have money for offices, electricity, free lunches, stratospheric pay packages, data centers, and many other things. Why not for content?
OpenAI claims they can use the content for free, under a legal concept called fair use, because they are transforming it into something new, like a musician who samples a track to create a fresh composition. But unlike an artist honoring a predecessor, OpenAI “transformed” the information in such a way that no one would ever know where it came from, by stripping copyright and author information as they processed it. That’s like stealing your car and then grinding off the VIN number (only with millions or billions of cars).
Maybe OpenAI thought that publishers, especially nonprofit ones like us, would not be able to put up a fight. Our budget, after all, is something like one-half of one percent of Sam Altman’s net worth, and their legal team—let’s just say you can’t toss a golf ball in San Francisco or Washington without hitting one of them.
And OpenAI has Donald Trump on its side too: This week, the administration went to the trouble of filing a brief in the lawsuit, an unusual step for the government to take at such an early stage in the process. The brief supports OpenAI, saying it’s a vital national interest for AI companies not to have to pay for content (with a dig about how that would just be a subsidy for “old mainstream media companies” anyway). Given Trump’s history with paying people, that tracks.
But OpenAI—and Trump—are wrong. Just as not all communities are rolling over for data centers (despite Trump ordering them to “let data reign”), some publishers are fighting back, and we are one of them. For the last two years we’ve been involved in a lawsuit asking OpenAI to respect our copyright, and September 4 marks a crucial deadline, when both sides are asking the court to decide the case ahead of going to trial. So it seems a good time to unpack what’s going on, because this is about a lot more than journalism.
As a society, we’re starting to grapple with the fact that tech moguls are building things they don’t understand and can’t control. Much as when humans first split the atom, we are dealing with technology that can be both immensely useful and extremely dangerous, and right now it doesn’t seem as if our leaders, from corporate CEOs to politicians, are willing to grapple with those risks. As Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel write in The Atlantic, “it can feel like no individual person, organization, or government is really steering the technology’s development, not because machines have displaced humans but because so many humans have already chosen to step aside.” (Emphasis mine).
One reason it’s so frustrating to watch this happen is that while the tech is new, the playbook is incredibly familiar. From Uber and Airbnb steamrolling communities when they rolled out their products, to Flock putting all of us under surveillance, we’ve seen this movie before: Tech company does what it wants, takes what it needs, and asks permission later. Or never, because “move fast and break things.”
So too with journalism. Back when Facebook and Google were trying to pull in users by offering news, they’d occasionally hand out checks to publishers—paying them to pivot to video, appear in a promoted “news tab,” or be part of a fact-checking program. Inevitably, they would hand-pick big, commercial publishers to partner with, further centralizing the information ecosystem. (In the end, of course, the joke was on the publishers when the tech giants pulled back on news and threw open the doors to disinformation.)
We’ve faced down dark-money billionaires and shadowy charities, the Reagan administration’s IRS and Trump’s Pentagon. So we’re fighting this giant, too.
And now the AI companies are playing that same game. OpenAI has picked select media companies to cut deals with, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vox Media, the German publishing giant Axel Springer, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and others. The official take is that these deals will, in the words of Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson, give journalism “a voice in shaping how news is surfaced on their platforms.” But beneath the cheer lies panic.
We’re headed to a world—we’re probably already there—where most people get their news from a chatbot. Sure, some folks may continue reading articles on websites, just like we still occasionally catch a movie in a theater. But that will not be how audiences connect with news most of the time, which means that a lot of the revenue that pays for journalism today—advertising, subscriptions, donations—will go away.
With a giant robot poised to strangle the industry, pleading for a handout may be an appealing short-term strategy. But it’s never been our thing here at Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting. We’ve faced down dark-money billionaires and shadowy charities, the Reagan administration’s IRS and the Trump Pentagon’s lackeys. So we’re fighting this giant, too.
It’s not easy. Our team has spent countless hours digging up information for this case, putting motions together, giving depositions. But it’s worth it, because this is the big one—for us, and for you.
AI models do not fact-check, verify, or investigate. They don’t pore over documents, file Freedom of Information Act requests, or sit with someone for hours until they’re ready to tell their story. They don’t go to sleep at night thinking about how to bring a story to light for the first time.
There have been a lot of crises for journalism in the last 40 years, and we’ve lost much: Tens of thousands of jobs are gone, two-thirds of all the newspapers in the country have shuttered. But if AI companies break the connection between journalists and the people we serve—if a chatbot gives you information, and you aren’t told who worked to dig it up—that’s really game over.
The AI companies have a lot of money and time. Newsrooms don’t. But we are battling for our lives, and for the truth that you need to know. This is all of our fight.