AI Could Destroy Journalism as We Know It. Media Mogul Barry Diller Hopes to Save It

Media mogul Barry Diller warned on Wednesday that artificial intelligence (AI) could be as "destructive" to news publishers as free online news was in the early aughts. Speaking at the Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism, Diller, who co-founded Fox Broadcasting Company and is now chairman of publishing giant IAC, said he was teaming up with News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson and German publisher Axel Springer to protect news publishers from the threat of AI. Speaking in conversation with journalist and conference organizer Tina Brown, Diller said it was a "terrible mistake" for publishers, through inaction, to allow AI tools like ChatGPT to "suck up every known piece of work that has ever been done". Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on massive amounts of content scraped from across the internet. The billionaire, who is also chairman of Expedia, compared the potential impact of AI on media companies to the early days of online news before paywalls were introduced.