CHATBOTS !SAMDAILYTIMES! CHARTERS : MASTER ESSAY

 

GLOBAL Founder Framers - the students of the entire world : HERE COME the chatbots. So it's very important that the Global Founders of The World Students Society look at A.I.'s impact on !WOW's publishing and eventual journalism and digital strategy.

The impact of ''generative'' A.I., which can generate text, images and other media from prompts, has become a top priority in discussions among publishers. A conference in New York in May, the World Congress of News Media, will feature keynote speeches on the issue, according to a schedule on its website.

The News Media Alliance, which represents 2,000 outlets around the world, including The New York Times, is working on principles that it says should guide the use and development of A.I. systems and regulations around them to protect publishers.

The publishing industry has spent the past two decades struggling to adjust to the Internet, as print circulation has plummeted and tech companies have gobbled up rivers of advertising revenues.

New artificial intelligence tools from Google and Microsoft give answers to search engines in full paragraphs, rather than a list of links. Many publishers worry that far fewer people will click through to news sites as a result, shrinking traffic - and, by extension, revenue.

The new A.I. search tools remain in limited release, so publishers such as Conde Nast and Vice have not yet recorded effects on their business.

But in an effort to prevent the industry from being upended without their input, many are pulling together task forces to weigh options, making the topic a priority at industry conferences and, through a trade organization, planning a push to be paid for the use of their content by chatbots.

''You could essentially call this the Wikipedia-ization of a lot of information,'' said Bryan Goldberg, the chief executive of BDG, which publishes lifestyle and culture websites like Bustle, Nylon and Romper.

''You're bringing together Wikipedia-style answers to an infinite number of questions, and that's just going to nuke many corners of the open web.''

Content publishers have an uneven but largely reciprocal relationship with search engines. The search sites benefit from having trusted sources of information in the results, and the publishers benefit from the traffic to their sites that the search engines generate.

Search traffic from Google accounts for half of overall visits, or more, to many sites, said Brian Morrissey, who writes The Rebooting, a media business newsletter.

'' Search has been the mainstay of the publishing business on the internet,'' he said.

Kyle Sutton, director of search and product at the newspaper publisher Gannett, said the relationship had, until now, been mutually beneficial.

''While all search results are taking from our data and, from our perspective, crawling our content, aggregating our content, there is the return there of them driving traffic to our site,'' Mr. Sutton said. 

'' So I think that relationship is kind of first and foremost what we want to see maintained.''

The new offerings could change all of that, said Barbara Peng, president of the digital news brand Insider, Microsoft is incorporating the chatbot into Bing, its search engine. Google search chatbot, Bard, is separate from its main search engine.

'' This will be revolutionary,'' Ms. Peng said, adding, ''It will take some time, and there is a good portion of hype mixed in there, too, but I do think it will change the relationship people have with finding and consuming information. 

Vice media has created a task force in recent months to examine its own approach, said Cory Haik, the chief operating officer. ''It will have a huge impact on publishing in ways that we can't even get our heads around yet,'' she predicted.

The Washington Post announced on Tuesday that it had appointed a deputy business editor to lead the internal group looking at A.I.'s impact on The Post's journalism and digital strategy.

The Essay continues into the Future. The World Students Society thanks author Katie Robertson.