The owner of Facebook has signed data agreements with publishers to use their content to create artificial intelligence products focused on live news.
Meta Platforms has struck commercial agreements with news publishers including USA Today, People, CNN, Fox News and Le Monde, among others, as it pushes into content generated by AI.
The tech giant said that it was signing deals with media companies as part of its efforts to “offer a broader range of real-time content”, including global news and entertainment stories. Meta AI will be trained to send links to users when responding to questions about world events.
The company said that it wanted to make its AI models “more responsive, accurate, and balanced”, adding: “Real-time events can be challenging for current AI systems to keep up with, but by integrating more and different types of news sources, our aim is to improve Meta AI’s ability to deliver timely and relevant content and information with a wide variety of viewpoints and content types.”
Meta has been regarded as a laggard in AI because its projects fall short of developments from rivals such as Microsoft, which has partnered with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. Mark Zuckerberg’s tech group has committed billions of dollars to AI but the company’s Llama language model has not been as successful as products produced by Silicon Valley peers.
The Facebook owner is said to be considering cuts to its budget for Metaverse, a virtual reality project first announced in 2021. Analysts at Bank of America said in a note that “re-allocating spend to bigger perceived opportunities is positive for the stock”. The note said: “While generative AI returns are still uncertain, they offer more optionality to capture potential upside from emerging AI use cases such as AI assistants, generative creative tools and outsourcing Meta computing capabilities.”
Meta’s pledge to send content links to users comes amid growing criticism from publishers of AI technologies that scrape data from their websites and reduce online traffic.
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Google has scraped data from publishers’ websites and create versions of their content for what it calls “AI overviews”. The summaries allow users to see content on the Google search page, rather than clicking through to another site.
DMG Media, the owner of brands including Daily Mail Online and Metro, has complained about AI overviews leading to a drop in referrals to its websites of 89 per cent. The publisher told the Competition and Markets Authority that Google’s summaries were “carefully constructed” to ensure “the user has no reason to read any further” than the search page. Meanwhile, Enders Analysis, the research group, has warned publishers that “search traffic is no longer a given” in the age of artificial intelligence.