As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues its onward march in news aggregation, publishers worry about the technology’s negative impact on traditional revenue models and the push towards paywall and subscription models. Lawsuits against AI chatbots by news organisations have become a regular trend in the world, with the latest litigation now coming in from Canada.

India also joined this bandwagon not too long ago with the Asian News International (ANI) agency taking OpenAI to court for using its news content for AI training. In light of these growing objections, businessline spoke to publisher groups like the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and the Editors Guild of India (EGI) who raised serious concerns about AI’s impact on their income.

Stating that AI summarisations of news has shifted reader attention away from original news outlets, Anant Nath, President of EGI and Editor of The Caravan magazine, said, “Due to AI, the user remains confined to the tech platform and consumes news within the tech platform without going to the original news source. So as a result, many of us have now put our content behind a paywall. We expect people to come to our website, pay for our content and support news gathering,” he said, adding that publishers remain apprehensive of AI crawlers that even bypass paywalls and continue to use news content without due citation or accuracy.

• Also read: NBFCs raise funds via ECB route as banks tighten loan pipeline

It may be noted that some companies like Google had started providing in-line links to original sources brlow their AI-generated contented. Google said that this “increase the traffic” to the original websites. However, Gautham Koorma, machine learning engineer and researcher from UC Berkeley, said it is unclear whether the chatbots have access to the breadth of sources available to a traditional web crawler used by search engines.

“This could lead to fewer clicks on original sources if users just read the summaries, which might reduce revenue for news agencies relying on click through rates and ad-driven models rather than subscriptions,” said Koorma.

Serious concern

Like the EGI leader, Sujata Gupta, Secretary General of the DNPA, stated that misattribution or hallucination by AI is a serious concern for news publishers.

“The increasing reliance on AI for news aggregation and summarization could significantly disrupt traditional revenue streams for publishers. AI-driven platforms often repurpose original content without fair compensation, and reduce direct traffic to publisher websites. Digital media, particularly small and mid-sized news outlets, may face immediate challenges due to their dependency on ad-driven revenue. However, traditional publications and news agencies are also vulnerable as AI evolves to mimic comprehensive reporting and analysis,” said Sujata Gupta, Secretary General of the DNPA.

Incidentally, Varshul CW, Founder of audio generative AI company DubverseAI, agreed with the idea that digital media may be facing a worser fate than traditional publications due to AI’s entry in news.

“I think what has happened lately is that media business is dependent on digital interaction. Now, that interaction has further changed. So rather than push and pull between traditional and digital, I see that the digital itself is now fighting with AI,” he said.

Can AI takeover news publishing?

Despite the nervousness within the news community towards AI, Koorma pointed out that generative AI’s use in search has not been particularly successful.

“It remains in an experimental rollout phase. For instance, Google earlier this year released a premature search summarization feature that led to a wave of memes due to erroneous responses,” said Koorma, adding that the ongoing legal battles between news agencies like ANI versus companies like OpenAI could significantly shape the future of AI applications in news and search.

Until then publishers like Nath maintain that tech platforms are taking advantage of publishers by failing to share both revenues and the legal/moral responsibility when providing information.

“Tech companies are transcending into being a publisher. So, they have to don the role of publisher, take the responsibilities of being a publisher because tomorrow if there is a defamation case, they can’t say the original content creator is responsible,” said Nath.

When asked about a possible solution to the revenue predicament, Nath said that publishers and tech companies should engage on three levels; accuracy, citation and some amount of revenue share as a license fee for using news content for commercial purposes. Similarly, the DNPA called for a robust framework that ensures AI systems appropriately attribute content.

“Journalism serves the public interest and is well accountable for all the news that is generated with heavy investment in newsrooms, while AI leveraging other company’s journalistic content for commercial purposes does not align with this principle,” said Gupta.