Axel Springer’s past statements have led to fears that it is a champion of AI for newsroom automation with profitability the primary concern. A closer look at the company’s AI deals might actually mean it is about to emerge as the defender of quality (human) journalism for the very pragmatic reason that its funding depends on it.
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“Our goal is to become an AI-first company,” Samir Fadlallah, chief information officer at Axel Springer, said at the recent DMEXCO conference, before going on to note that Generative AI will change both how people consume content and how publishers create it.
Axel Springer is no stranger to controversy when it comes to AI.
Last year the publisher of Bild, and Die Welt, as well as Politico on the other side of the Atlantic, announced that it was banking on AI to cut costs, and that a third of newspaper jobs could disappear.
Worse, CEO Mathias Döpfner voiced the unthinkable when he said “Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was — or simply replace it.”
In France newspapers are eyeing the adoption of AI with far more caution, and far more consideration about the future of the news industry. Axel Springer’s approach seemed cold-hearted, at best.
However the brutality of the initial Axel Springer messaging about AI may have blinded us to a far more important development in the company’s relationship with the technology, and Big Technology’s relationship with news.
That issue is not about cost cutting, or productivity, but about the possibility that the very nature of Generative AI may have just put real value on quality information. Delivering quality may be the only real future for news publishers, and Axel Springer and OpenAI have gone and put a price on it.
Cast your mind back to last December when Axel Springer announced a deal with OpenAI.
While American giants like The New York Times seem intent on swinging wildly at AI, first suing OpenAI for ‘billions’, and now pursuing Perplexity, Axel Springer seemed to have opted for a realpolitik approach that just might see it make some money in the process. While the precise details of the Axel Springer/OpenAI deal remain a secret, the Financial Times claims insider talk of an ‘eight figure sum’ which not only involves a down payment for the use of legacy content from the publisher, but ongoing future payments for access to its content.
For an industry which still remembers standing back in shock as Big Tech waltzed up and built a multibillion advertising business off the back of search, using news content as a lever, this might look like a chance to get it right this time. For those of us on the news publishing side of the equation we really have to hope so, and the powerful precedent of Axel Springer’s deal is truly good news.
As an industry, however, we’re also famously cynical, and some would say it’s one of our key strengths. Which means it’s worth a look at why Big Tech is suddenly inclined to cut us a share in the future.
Why should Big Tech help us now?
Big Tech hasn’t just grown a conscience, or a love for the news business. If it’s paying it’s because it believes it’s making an investment and at Upgrade Media we feel that there are two reasons for that.
The first is that American companies feel the fear of litigation. The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into AI companies, which helps those involved focus on whether their business practices will be declared fair when shown up to the light. The current generation of AI models learnt from publishers, that’s not a secret, but the claim has been that this involved no copyright infringement; the LLMs were simply learning. The existence of generative AI, now writing reports and stories using information, phrases, vocabulary, and tone that has all come from previously published work makes that less clear.
Which makes it a smart move for tech to be seen to partner news business, not simply profit from them, so it has a defence in case it is ruled to have been pilfering all this time.
The other is that as the Generative AI it has spawned is used more and more for everything from press releases to sports coverage there is the growing risk that those LLMs are not learning from human experts any more. Instead they’re learning from AI generated copy, itself often referred to as ‘slop’. If the big AI companies are to offer the promise of genuinely good content, they have to ensure that this genuinely good content continues to exist in order to learn from it. Which means investing in the future of journalism; at least at the high end anyway.
So the Axel Springer experiment is really the frontline for us all. They need to walk the tightrope of creating really good content – better than AI generated content – while profiting from the productivity potential that AI offers in the newsroom. If they get carried away and overuse AI they risk diluting their promise of quality, and with it their financial future with the Tech giants. As such they are walking a fine line that awaits us all.
Axel Springer is embracing the technology in a number of ways. It is using chatbots to combine news websites with generative AI-prompt engineering done by journalists. It is applying technology to optimise headlines, A/B test them, and create keywords and metadata (all jobs no journalist I’ve ever met signed up for). It’s also using it in the advertising space, where the promise is that it provides a contextual targeting solution to the problems caused by the death of cookies.
But if it goes overboard on Generative AI it becomes part of the problem for an infosphere that risks drowning in slop. Which is not what the likes of OpenAI are paying for.
The ‘AI-first’ Axel Springer is the one to watch, not for its threats of cost-cutting, or its bold championing of the technology, but for the way it navigates this new relationship with both Big Tech, and the whole issue of quality publishing.
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