On Wednesday, news industry executives urged Congress to legally clarify that using journalism to train AI assistants like ChatGPT is not fair use, as companies like OpenAI claim. Instead, they would prefer a licensing regime for AI training content that would force Big Tech companies to pay for the content in a similar way to music clearinghouses.
The call for action came during a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “AI Oversight: The Future of Journalism,” chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, with Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri also playing a important role in the procedure. Last year, the pair of senators introduced a bipartisan framework for AI legislation and held a series of hearings on the impact of AI.
Blumenthal described the situation as an “existential crisis” for the news industry and cited social media as a cautionary tale for legislative inaction on AI. “We need to move faster than we did on social media and learn from our mistakes in the delay,” he said.
Companies like OpenAI have admitted that large amounts of copyrighted material are needed to train large AI language models, but claim that their use is transformative and covered by copyright law's fair use precedents. 'US author. OpenAI is currently negotiating licensing content from some news providers and surprising deals, but executives at the hearing said those efforts aren't enough, citing newsroom closures in the U.S. and declining revenue of the media as Big Tech profits soar.
English 
Español de Venezuela 