Copyright risks without rewards
Publishers have spent years building trust with their audiences by delivering reliable information. If AI-generated content appears on chatbots on publishers’ websites, and that content is either not useful or full of misinformation, that could damage a publisher’s brand, said Don Marti, vp of ecosystem innovation at publisher network Raptive.
Moreover, publishers risk infringing on the copyright of other creators as the content licensing model of generative AI still gets ironed out.
“Getting the copyright issue resolved before relying on it too heavily seems like a good path,” Marti said.
Even without the risks chatbots bring to publishers, the benefits of the technology are not yet clear.
Google and Facebook introduced widgets years ago where publishers could populate their websites with interfaces from the companies and earn revenue on ads that occurred on these interfaces, said Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade body Digital Content Next. These products never really took off.
“The general goal [of those features] is the same as Microsoft’s: to bring a new feature to users on the web,” Kint said. “They’re trying to get adoption of a product. Is the real estate on the page worth the money we get?”
Reimagining the user interface
As much as the progression of AI can be seen as a threat to publishers’ existing models, it’s also a new reality of media they must adapt to.
Raptive has developed AI tools to help publishers create content, from helping generate story ideas to assisting with search engine optimization, Marti said.
Whether publishers should adopt AI tools that are visible on the front end, such as Microsoft’s chatbot, depends on the publisher’s audience, Marti said.
For example, a publication whose readers were already chatbot users and tended to be early adopters of new technologies would benefit more from adopting front-facing AI than those known for extremely high-fidelity, trustworthy content, he added.
But the lab for such experimentation is not necessarily the website or app. Microsoft did not specify in its release the exact medium it plans to focus on, though the API nature of the product means the focus is likely on publishers’ existing interfaces.
If the dominant experience for finding information online becomes asking a chatbot a question instead of searching Google and reading a website, publishers will have to reimagine how they deliver their content, potentially developing custom experiences for readers based on a corpus of proprietary data and reporting, Morrissey said.
