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Publishers are sounding the alarm about the dangers of A.I.

At the annual INMA World Congress of News Media on Thursday, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger both spoke in plain terms about how the rapidly developing technology will inevitably disrupt and transform the news business. 

"The quest to protect provenance has entered a fresh phase ... with the rapid evolution of generative AI, which certainly has the potential to be degenerative AI," Thomson said. "The task for all here is to ensure that we are AI alchemists and that it becomes regenerative AI."

Sulzberger echoed Thomson's concerns, telling the audience that artificial intelligence "is almost certainly going to usher in a torrent of crap into the information ecosystem, totally poisoning it."

There are already plenty of examples of A.I. authoritatively passing along false information to readers. The CNET fiasco, in which the outlet quietly used the technology to help write stories, dozens of which later had to be corrected after errors were discovered, being perhaps the most prominent.

As the technology driving the A.I. revolution becomes more advanced, and as media companies fall under increased pressure to minimize costs, there will certainly be temptation to wield the technology in a way that slims budgets. BuzzFeed has, for instance, already announced how it will begin using the technology to produce content — though chief executive Jonah Peretti has insisted he doesn't want the technology to supplant human workers. 

It's not hard to see how other outlets might go down a path that leads to them using A.I. to publish actual stories, which could ultimately result in misinformation being peddled to the masses as fact, just like in the CNET case. But unlike CNET, which does have editorial standards, content farms that are not concerned with the truth will be less likely to have guardrails in place to catch errors and/or correct them.

On the financial side of the equation, newsrooms might ironically be adversely affected by A.I., despite effectively helping to train the machines. In recent weeks, Google demonstrated it will soon integrate A.I. into its ubiquitous search engine, placing A.I. generated answers at the top of search results, over the usual list of links, potentially cutting off a major revenue source for news publishers.

"As for the future, and it is the near future, there are three areas in which our collective IP is under threat and for which we should argue vociferously for compensation - the emerging picture is what you might call a tech triptych," Thomson said. 

"Firstly, our content is being harvested and scraped and otherwise ingested to train AI engines," he continued. "Secondly, individual stories will be surfaced in specific searches. And, thirdly, our content will be synthesized and presented as distinct when it is actually an extracting of editorial essence. These are super snippets, containing all the effort and insight of great journalism but designed so the reader will never visit a journalism website, thus fatally undermining that journalism."

"We are accustomed to defining coal or copper mining as an extractive industry," Thomson added. "Content mining is an extractive industry."

And while A.I. developers and industry leaders are openly calling for the government to step in and enact regulations on the nascent technology to avoid a potential "existential risk," Thomson said he did not expect that to happen. 

"I don’t think there is going to be regulation of AI anytime soon," Thomson said. "There won’t be any coherent, cogent response in a regulatory way."

———  BELOW THE FOLD  ———

The Next Trump Town Hall: Fox News announced Sean Hannity will host a town hall with Donald Trump on June 1 — the first town hall with the disgraced former president since CNN's widely criticized event. Given Hannity's long history of peddling propaganda on behalf of Trump, this event is likely to be far less contentious. But Hannity will still have to navigate some tricky minefields, given the legal hot water Fox is still in over Trump's election lies. To that end, it is notable that Fox will not be airing the Trump town hall live. Instead, the network said in a press release that it will pre-tape the event earlier in the day and broadcast it at 9pm. That gives the right-wing channel the opportunity to make sure that whatever is aired is squared away legally.

► Meanwhile: CNN announced another Republican town hall. This one with former Vice President Mike Pence, which will air June 7 and be moderated by Dana Bash. 

Meeting The Messenger: Media mogul Jimmy Finklestein is confident as ever that his new digital media outlet, The Messenger, will be a success. That's according to a new interview he gave Vanity Fair's Joe Pompeo, where he predicted the news site will generate "tens of millions of dollars" in direct advertising sales in the first year. Finklestein countered criticism the outlet, which launched last week with a flurry of aggregated articles, has faced. When Pompeo said that his impression was the outlet would mimic the Daily Mail, Finklestein replied: "Your impressions are wrong." He added of The Messenger: "Not a tabloid. That’s a mistake. It is a very serious publication that will also have lots of fun articles in it." Read Pompeo's full piece here.

Forgotten on Fox: It was one of the big stories covered Thursday on CNN and MSNBC. But over on Fox News, it received almost no attention. The right-wing network barely mentioned the sentencing of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, all but ignoring the first seditious conspiracy sentence handed down in over a decade. When I searched Fox News transcripts, I only found two mentions of Rhodes, which occurred in the 1pm and 6pm hours. That's it. Of course, this comes from the network that mainstreamed 1/6 trutherism, so it's not a surprise. But it's worth noting the network continues to bury news of Trump supporters' complicity in the attack.

Mark Rallies Meta: Mark Zuckerberg "attempted to rally the [Meta] troops on Thursday, following multiple rounds of layoffs that have decimated the social media giant’s workforce," The WaPo's Naomi Nix reported. According to Nix, Zuckerberg told employees that he hopes the company will be more stable heading into the future. Over the past eight months, Meta has cut about a staggering 24% of its workforce, or one in four employees. "Going through restructuring and layoffs and changes like this is obviously a very difficult thing," Zuckerberg told Meta staffers, per Nix. "So it’s not like we’re going to end up in exactly the place that we were before because that wasn’t my goal. I wanted to get to a scrappier place." Read Nix's full story here.

🔎 Zooming in: "The layoffs at Meta arrive as the company is battling a series of threats to its business model," Nix noted. "Upstart apps such as the short-form video network TikTok have intensified the competition among social media companies for advertising dollars and users. Broader challenges in the digital advertising industry, such as new privacy rules from Apple and slowing growth in the e-commerce market, have hurt Meta’s coffers. Meanwhile, the company’s long-term bet to build out immersive digital worlds known as the metaverse shows no immediate signs of paying off."

MoviePass, The Sequel: MoviePass is back. Well, sort of. The company, under new ownership, resurfaced on Thursday after bankruptcy and launched its new subscription service. The newly revamped service will be accepted at more than 4,000 theaters across the U.S. — but it will no longer offer the magical deal it once did, which allowed for unlimited films at a mere $9.95 a month. Instead, new passes will start at $10 a month for up to 3 movies, and $40 a month for 30 movies. Variety's Todd Spangler has more here.

Thank you for reading! This newsletter was edited by Jon Passantino and produced with the assistance of Liam Reilly. Have feedback? Send us an email here. We will see you back in your inbox on Tuesday.