Meta to News Companies: Help Us Train Our AI

Meta has reportedly held talks with media companies about using their articles for AI training.

The tech giant has had discussions with companies including Axel Springer, Fox Corp and News Corp, about licensing their articles for use in its artificial intelligence (AI) tools, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Thursday (Sept. 18), citing sources familiar with the matter.

The WSJ notes that this marks a shift for Meta, which has in recent years focused less on news content and has had an on-again, off-again relationship with publishers. After forging multimillion-dollar deals to include stories from outlets like the WSJ and New York Times in its News tab, the company in 2022 said it would stop paying publishers.

According to the report, Meta’s move to give news less priority has caused many publishers’ Facebook traffic to drop.

Meta’s decision to give less priority to news led to declines in traffic from Facebook for many publishers. In recent months, however, some publishers said they have seen an uptick in traffic from the platform.

PYMNTS has contacted Meta for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

The company’s apparent efforts follow Google’s reported push to recruit news companies for an AI-related licensing project, per a July Bloomberg News report.

That report, citing sources familiar with the matter, said Google was aiming to launch a pilot project with around 20 national news organizations.

“We’ve said that we’re exploring and experimenting with new types of partnerships and product experiences, but we aren’t sharing details about specific plans or conversations at this time,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, AI search firm Perplexity last month said it had set aside $42.5 million for a revenue sharing program that pays publishers when their content is used by the company’s Comet browser or AI assistant.

“AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid,” CEO Arvind Srinivas said at the time. “Sowe think this is actually the right solution, and we’re happy to make adjustments along the way.”

Many media companies have taken AI firms to court, accusing them of copyright infringement. One day after Perplexity announced the revenue sharing program, a pair of Japanese companies — Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper —± sued the company for using their published work without consent.

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