AI companies freeze out partisan media | Semafor
Last week, OpenAI announced a five-year deal to license content from News Corp.’s outlets to train AI. It’s the latest in a series of deals with establishment outlets whose politics range from center-left to center-right, including the Associated Press, Politico and Business Insider owner Axel Springer, and the Financial Times.
But while some on the left groused that the News Corp. package includes the right-leaning tabloid New York Post, the true impact of the new marriage of AI and news appears to be the revenge of the establishment media. And fringier, more explicitly ideological outlets on the right have noticed that their businesses – already rocked by an industry-wide decline in web traffic – seem unlikely to get an AI bailout.
The problem is that publishing empires like Axel Springer and News Corp. actually are pretty right-wing and have an overlap with the “fringe” right-wing media that has been growing in recent years (I mean where did people like Tucker Carlson emerge from?) The FT is probably the most left of those cited above and that’s a newspaper for the business elite owned by Nikkei, the voice of the Japanese corporate establishment.