The plan solves. Requiring licensing strengthens the journalism industry and ensures people have access to accurate, reliable information.

Requiring tech companies to license the use of news publishers’ content through this type of legislation would help ensure that smaller, local, niche, and non-English language news publishers would also be able to negotiate for the use of their content and data. This type of journalism could be particularly useful for localizing generative search, summarization, content creation, and other applications that make use of journalism to provide more accurate, timely, and relevant results, particularly in languages other than English.

Journalism can also be an important source of data for improving the quality of foundation models, which suffer from bias, misinformation, and spam that make access to diverse sources of quality, factual information, especially in low-resourced digital languages, even more valuable. Furthermore, as the quality of data becomes as important as the quantity of data, journalism provides a constant source of new, timely, human-generated data.

We are in a moment when the news industry needs to unite. As giant media conglomerates and major publications strike deals with the tech giants, they need to demand a framework that will benefit journalism in the public interest, not just line the pockets of their corporate owners. That is why the only way journalism will survive AI is to double down on its journalists. As important as it will be for journalism to adapt to and integrate AI, newsrooms that replace journalists will hasten its demise, with profound ramifications for democracy in the U.S. and around the world.

News outlets must consider how to optimize revenue streams and assert their pricing autonomy throughout the AI value chain. They will need to figure out how to unlock the value of journalism by adopting sophisticated and dynamic compensation frameworks and pricing strategies for news content in various parts of AI systems and AI applications. They will need access to information about the way their content is used in AI systems, including data sets and foundational model weights. And they will need government regulations that enable them to do so.