Paul Murphy Warns Big Tech Is Parasitical on Journalism

Thanks for your presentations. I think they represent a very loud alarm bell about what's happening and the undermining of the media landscape, of the work of journalists, and it doesn't stop there. That has very significant impacts in terms of the capacity to have any sort of genuinely democratic society. So I think there's a question about whether that alarm bell is going to be heeded or not, so I really appreciate your work on this. Maybe just to start with the question of, which is maybe mostly to the NUJ and news brands but whoever wants to comment on it, effectively big tech has been parasitical on journalism. This isn't just an AI issue, it's a social media issue in the sense that content is generated by journalists, they have to be paid somehow, but big tech through social media is able to kind of profit from this. They're able to steal the material, put it out there without having to pay any journalists. And in a way AI just supercharges it, but it just understates it, it supercharges the whole thing, whereby now you go and you ask the internet a question via a search engine like Google and you are kind of force-fed, unless you choose to opt out, an AI-generated answer, which has gone to read various articles and come up with something that may or may not be accurate. What's the kind of policy tool to stop this, to ensure that we have money that can be generated, that can be used to continue, that journalism continues to exist, that we actually have people writing real stories, rather than where we're going to get to is a situation whereby AI is generating news stories off of other AI-generated news stories, which in turn, and we just are in a kind of down the rabbit hole of AI-generated slop with no relationship to reality, because no one's been paid to actually go out and find out facts about what is happening. I would agree that tech companies are parasites, have got away with being uncontrolled in their activity, probably part of it where we're looking to have them, and if there are going to be parasites, we might as well have them in Dublin. But I don't buy into that logic at all. I think there has to be an ethical and moral approach to this. My own view is, Deputy Mark, who mentioned earlier, is that a tech, and the NUJ has long called for a tech tax, and that that will be a significant tax, 6% is the figure that has been mentioned in the UK and Ireland, and that that, you know, we're not going to be able to curb them, so therefore what you have to do is, you do certainly have some legislative basis, but there also has to be a financial fund which compensates. It's very difficult to understate the damage done when your work is, you know, we've done some surveys on it in, you know, in the UK and in Ireland, and the number of freelancers who have identified their copy that has not just been stolen, but in many cases used and abused and misrepresented. We have in copyright law the issue of moral rights, asserting your moral right, the right not to have your copy misrepresented in some way. But the treatment of tech giants, to the point I made earlier to Deputy Gibney, as not being publishers is at the heart of this, that they somehow enjoy this self-selected status, and we allow that. And that is, I think, at the heart of it, and I think the key thing for us is content can't be used without consent, and that's the biggest issue, is our content is being used without consent or enumeration. And there's, you know, we need mechanisms to be able to get transparency, to be able to see data, what content is actually being used, and then the ability to be compensated for that. The question of attribution is a really important one. So, obviously, hand in hand with compensation goes attribution. And that is how you identify where did this content come from, what processes were used to generate it, and can I trust it, which is ultimately the question that everybody wants to ask. If we allow the platforms to do what they have been doing so far, they will make deals with a small number of selected agencies and news outlets around the world to feed the content and to be their attribution. But that will have a severely damaging effect on media diversity, media plurality, because they will be the only media organisations which continue to exist. The other thing that we need to think about doing is how can we get media outlets and the creative sector into the room for the discussions that are going on. Okay, we're in the room now. We weren't in the room when the AI Advisory Council were developing their paper. We were brought into the room after the paper had been issued to be, you know, and we were told about the contents of the paper. And I would invite anybody on this committee to read the paper closely and to see what it says about asserting the rights of publishers to their own content or any of the creative sector to their own content. It is more concerned, it seems to us, with the ability of platforms to assert the right to their software IPs. Yes. If I could just ask a question to Dr. Cullity and Ms. Chapman might want to comment as well. I mean, I was really struck by your opening statement, which is very strong, which I agree with, which speaks to how I feel when I see people ask Grok, like Grok is an oracle or something. You know what I mean? People confuse LLMs for an encyclopedia. But you speak about not just scams and low-quality slop and not just an adequate recognition of AI-generated material, but you go deeper about a dependency on these unreliable tools undermines our capacity to reason, which is something that certainly deeply concerns me. Could you maybe expand a little bit about that on the evidence relating to that? Well, the evidence actually comes from researchers at Microsoft. Microsoft is a big investor in open AI, and it develops lots of tools that it's trying to put into schools and workplaces, where they found that as soon as people become used to doing something, anything that is convenient, and if it's things that are accurate much of the time, most of us will go, well, sure, you know, that'll be okay. We'll take it, yeah. It's not like it's wrong all the time. So that makes it even harder for people to resist doing it. And then when it's been put there right in front of you, like if you open up a PDF now, Adobe will go, this looks like a long document, let me summarize for you, and it's only two pages long. So this is being foisted on us, and there is growing evidence to suggest that then it is replacing our own thinking. I mean, it's very interesting to me that terms like co-pilot are used, which is a complete distortion of what a co-pilot actually is in aviation. It's actually autopilot. It is you not thinking, you are letting something else do the work for you. But it says co-pilot to give you the illusion that you're still thinking in a sense like, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. In terms of that crossover between media literacy and AI literacy, media literacy involves a huge number of skills and those skills change all the time. But the fundamental building block of media literacy is the ability to interrogate information and to make an informed choice based on your ability to evaluate it. And those critical skills apply right across AI, more importantly than any other kind of bit of the whole kind of literacy tree. Thanks a lot. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks, Paul.