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Thomson Reuters CEO: AI deals can help protect journalism

Signing licensing deals with artificial companies can help protect good journalism, argues Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker.

Katie Prescott of The Times of London writes, “As boss of the enormous content company, Hasker has overseen a number of licensing deals with AI businesses in order to sell its information to power their large language models. These have included a tie-up with Meta Platforms. It uses models from OpenAI to underpin its legal AI assistant called CoCounsel.

“‘Reuters has a historical news file as a reference data set for these models. Our news is free of bias. It is independent. It’s fact based. It is triple checked and verified. We don’t offer opinions. We’re not leaning left or leaning right or spinning a narrative for the entertainment of our listeners, viewers or readers. It really is the underlying facts associated with the news. So it’s a particularly powerful source for these models to be trained on or built on,’ Hasker said.

“Many content businesses were taken by surprise by the advent of large language models and the realisation that their intellectual property may have been used to train them, without their knowledge or consent. Hasker said: ‘Licensing deals clear the air in terms of the legalities of that use. I think there’s definitely an element of that.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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