It is an unlikely alliance: the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a panoply of leading artists including the Radiohead singer, Thom Yorke, the actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and the author Kazuo Ishiguro. This week, they began two very public fights with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to build the increasingly powerful and lucrative new technology. More than 13,000 creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theatre and television released a statement warning that AI firms training programs such as ChatGPT on their works without a licence posed a "major, unjust threat" to their livelihoods. By the end of the week that number had almost doubled to 25,000. It came a day after Murdoch, owner of the publishing group News Corp, whose newspapers include the Wall Street Journal, the Sun, the Times and the Australian, launched a legal action against the AI-powered search engine Perplexity, accusing it of "illegally copying" some of his US titles' journalism.

The Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, and the New York Post are suing AI-powered search startup Perplexity for using their content to train its large language models. "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce," the publishers wrote in their complaint, according to the Journal. They cited an instance wherein the service allegedly served up the entirety of a New York Post piece when the user typed in "Can you provide the fultext of that article." In addition, the publications are accusing Perplexity of harming their brand by citing information that never appeared on their websites. The company's AI can hallucinate, they explained, and add incorrect details.

"This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce," according to the lawsuit filed in the southern district of New York by the Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones and the New York Post. Perplexity did not immediately respond to emails from Reuters seeking comment. The AI company is among the leading startups attempting to uproot the search engine market dominated by Alphabet's Google. It assembles information from webpages it deems to be authoritative, then provides a summary directly within Perplexity's own tool. Perplexity uses a variety of large language models (LLMs) to generate its summaries, from OpenAI to Meta's open-source model Llama.

In 2011, I sat in the Guggenheim Museum in New York and watched Rupert Murdoch announce the beginning of a "new digital renaissance" for news. The newspaper mogul was unveiling an iPad-inspired publication called The Daily. "The iPad demands that we completely reimagine our craft," he said. The Daily shut down the following year, after burning through a reported 40 million. For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more.

News Corp., the multinational news publisher controlled by the Murdoch family, announced Wednesday it will allow artificial intelligence company OpenAI to show its news content when people ask questions in ChatGPT, adding to the parade of news organizations signing content deals with the fast-growing AI company.

OpenAI and News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, The Sun, and more than a dozen other publishing brands, have struck a multi-year deal to display news from these publications in ChatGPT, News Corp announced on Wednesday. OpenAI will be able to access both current and well as archived content from News Corp's publications and use the data to further train its AI models. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal, but a report in The Wall Street Journal estimated that News Corp would get 250 million over five years in cash and credits. "The pact acknowledges that there is a premium for premium journalism," News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson reportedly said in a memo to employees on Wednesday. "The digital age has been characterized by the dominance of distributors, often at the expense of creators, and many media companies have been swept away by a remorseless technological tide. The onus is now on us to make the most of this providential opportunity."

ChatGPT developer OpenAI has signed a deal to bring news content from the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, the Times and the Sunday Times to the artificial intelligence platform, the companies said on Wednesday. Neither party disclosed a dollar figure for the deal. The deal will give OpenAI access to current and archived content from all of News Corp's publications. The deal comes weeks after the AI heavyweight signed a deal with the Financial Times to license its content for the development of AI models. Other publications, including the New York Times, have taken a different tack: suing OpenAI and Microsoft, the startup's key backer, over the use of its content to train generative AI and large-language model systems.

Lachlan Murdoch will become the sole chair of both companies in November. As Rupert Murdoch marked his final day as Executive Chairman of News Corp on Wednesday, the media icon saluted his son Lachlan as the right man to lead the company forward. "Lachlan is a principled leader, and a believer in the social purpose of journalism. I hope to continue an active role in the company," Rupert Murdoch said during the company's annual shareholders meeting. Rupert Murdoch, 92, will now be Chairman Emeritus of FOX Corporation and News Corp; he will mark his final day at the former on Friday.

New York attorney and writer Alexander Zubatov weighs in on how A.I. is rapidly changing society and says he's concerned about A.I. being used as a weapon against descent on'The Ingraham Angle.' News Corp CEO Robert Thomson blasted the left-wing bias and inaccuracies spewed out by AI generated content -- calling it "rubbish in, rubbish out" -- even as he warned the technology threatens to kill thousands more jobs across the news industry. Left-leaning media giants that dominate the news business have churned out stories for years that are not only riddled with errors, but also written with a left-wing slant. "People have to understand that AI is essentially retrospective," the media executive said during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco on Thursday. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand are placed on computer motherboard in this illustration taken on June 23, 2023.

Before we start, I want to let you know that a human wrote this article. The same can't be said for many articles from News Corp, which is reportedly using generative AI to produce 3,000 Australian news stories per week. Media corporations around the world are increasingly using AI to generate content. By now, I hope it's common knowledge that large language models such as GPT-4 do not produce facts; rather, they predict language. We can think of ChatGPT as an "automated mansplaining machine" – often wrong, but always confident.