UK media giants join forces to curb AI’s use of their journalism
Sky News has teamed up with the BBC, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph to form a new coalition aimed at setting industry standards for how AI uses news content.
The group, under the name the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition (SPUR), has been launched in response to growing concern that AI systems are scraping and repurposing journalism without any permission or payment.
In an open letter published on Thursday, the five media leaders warned that AI is “fundamentally reshaping how content is created, distributed, discovered and monetised”.
It added that the industry must act together to protect original reporting.
“Across the industry, our reporting, our archives, our original content, have become foundational training material for AI systems”, the letter said.
“This material has been scraped, copied and reused with no common standards to enable permission or payment, weakening the economic model that supports journalism.”
The letter was signed British media leaders like Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes, BBC director-general Tim Davie, Financial Times chief executive Jon Slade, Guardian chief executive Anna Bateson and Telegraph Media Group chief executive Anna Jones.
They collectively described the rapid growth of AI as a “global challenge” and invited other publishers to join the initiative.
“We believe we need to come together to protect original journalism and secure the long-term sustainability of our industry”, the bosses stated.
AI’s effect on news
SPUR said it would work with tech firms and policymakers to develop shared standards that make sure original work can be used “sustainably”, and through “rights cleared, accountable channels”.
The coalition plans to point to gaps in tech tools to better protect intellectual property and push for transparency over how AI-generated answers are created, and what information they are based on. It also aims to become a global alliance.
The move comes as evidence mounts that AI tools are already reshaping how audiences access news, often with uneven results and often bias to different outlets.
Research published earlier this year by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that ChatGPT and Google Gemini did not cite the BBC in any responses to news-related queries, for example, despite the former being the UK’s most widely used news source.
ChatGPT cited the Guardian in 58 per cent of its answers, while the Telegraph, GB News and the Sun appeared only rarely.
When Google’s AI Overviews feature appeared in search results, users were almost half as likely to click through to a news website, the report showed.
Roa Powell, senior research fellow at IPPR, said at the time: “When the UK’s most trusted news source can disappear entirely from AI answers, it’s a clear warning sign about who now controls access to information”.
An OpenAI spokesperson has previously said the company is “committed to supporting quality journalism”.
The ChatGPT maker also pointed to partnerships with leading UK publishers, adding that it respects the choice of outlets that block their content from being used.
Meanwhile, the Competition and Markets Authority has proposed new rules that would allow publishers to opt out of having their content used in Google’s AI Overviews.
The regulator said that this would not affect their search visibility.