AI-generated news should carry “nutrition” labels and tech companies must pay publishers for the content they use, according to a left-of-centre thinktank, amid rising use of the technology as a source for current affairs.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said AI firms were rapidly emerging as the new “gatekeepers” of the internet and intervention was needed to create a healthy AI news environment.
It recommended standardised labels for AI-generated news, showing what information had been used to create those answers, including peer-reviewed studies and articles from professional news organisations. It also urged the establishment of a licensing regime in the UK allowing publishers to negotiate with tech companies over the use of their content in AI news.
“If AI companies are going to profit from journalism and shape what the public sees, they must be required to pay fairly for the news they use and operate under clear rules that protect plurality, trust and the long-term future of independent journalism,” said Roa Powell, senior research fellow at IPPR and the report’s co-author.
The IPPR said work on licensing could begin with the UK’s competition regulator using its new enforcement powers over Google. The Competition and Markets Authority this week proposed giving web publishers and news organisations the power to stop Google scraping their content for its overviews. Collective licensing deals would ensure a wide range of publishers were included, the IPPR added.
Google’s AI overviews now reach 2 billion users a month and approximately a quarter of people use AI to get information, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Copyright law should remain unchanged to ensure a licensing market grows, said the IPPR, while the government should encourage new business models for news that are not dependent on the tech sector, including supporting the BBC and local news providers.
“With the right policies in place, the government can shape this market so that UK news organisations transition their business models for the AI age and AI companies improve the reliability of their products by drawing on trusted sources,” said the report.
IPPR tested four AI tools – ChatGPT, Google AI overviews, Google Gemini and Perplexity – by entering 100 news-related queries into those platforms and analysing more than 2,500 links produced by the AI responses.
ChatGPT and Gemini did not cite journalism by the BBC, which has blocked the bots they use to assemble answers, while overviews and Perplexity used BBC content despite the broadcaster’s objections to those tools using its journalism.
The IPPR found the Telegraph, GB News, the Sun and the Daily Mail were cited in fewer than 4% of answers on ChatGPT, while the Guardian – which has a licensing deal with ChatGPT’s parent, OpenAI – was used as a source in nearly six out of 10 responses. The Financial Times, which also has a licensing deal with OpenAI, also featured highly. The Guardian was also the most common source used by Gemini, appearing in half of all answers.
Google’s use of AI summaries at the top of search results has affected click-through traffic for publishers, with a knock-on effect for their revenues, because many users read the overview without moving on to the original journalism.
The IPPR said questions needed to be asked about how financial relationships between AI companies and news providers shaped answers.
“If licensed publications appear more prominently in AI answers, there is a risk of locking out smaller and local news providers, who are less likely to get AI deals,” the report said.
IPPR added that while licensing deals could replace lost advertising revenues to an extent, they would not maintain a healthy news ecosystem. They could make news organisations dependent on tech giants for revenue and that income could easily disappear if copyright protections are weakened, said the thinktank.
The IPPR said there should be public funding to create new business models for investigative news and local news, whose sustainability could be threatened by the rise of AI news, and for the BBC to “innovate with AI”.
