Why pay for news when you can use AI?

For better or worse, asking people to pay for access to our news reporting is our business model.

If someone republishes our news articles without permission, we ask the person to take it down. If they don’t, we can usually go to the platform where the republication is available and ask that it be taken down as a copyright violation.

Unless the platform itself is the one doing the republishing. As seen on Facebook today, a user just asked Google to provide an AI “summary” of an article or topic and the Google tool obliged:

Here’s the original article. The AI summary formatting is more compact and it is missing the season records for each team, but otherwise it’s a full reproduction of the article’s content.

(To be transparent, this particular article did not involve significant time for our sports reporter to produce; it was information submitted to us via press release and we published it accordingly. But the same thing could happen with an article that involves significant original reporting.)

No, there is no way to tell Google to stop crawling our newspaper’s website for content to use in its AI “summaries” without also telling it to essentially remove us from whatever helpful search results we might be appearing in.

Some users will still find the friction of going to an AI tool to get what they want to be annoying enough that paying for a subscription will be worth it. But as the friction is reduced and people continue to tell each other that news should be available without any cost or concern for how it is produced, I’m sure the number of paying subscribers will drop too.