Generative AI Can't Cite Its Sources

Silicon Valley appears, once again, to be getting the better of America's newspapers and magazines. Tech companies are injecting every corner of the web with AI language models, which may pose an existential threat to journalism as we currently know it. After all, why go to a media outlet if ChatGPT can deliver the information you think you need? A growing number of media companies--the publishers of The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, New York, Politico, The Atlantic, and many others--have signed licensing deals with OpenAI that will formally allow the start-up's AI models to incorporate recent partner articles into their responses. OpenAI is just the beginning, and such deals may soon be standard for major media companies: Perplexity, which runs a popular AI-powered search engine, has had conversations with various publishers (including The Atlantic's business division) about a potential ad-revenue-sharing arrangement, the start-up's chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, told me yesterday.