NYT, The Economist and AFP join SPUR coalition against unauthorized AI use of journalism

Forty media groups, including The New York Times, The Economist and Agence France-Presse (AFP), have joined the SPUR coalition, a global publisher group, the coalition announced Tuesday. The group seeks to stop AI companies using journalism without permission.

What is the SPUR coalition?

SPUR, short for Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, is a global coalition of news publishers launched in February. It aims to help media companies track their content, highlight illegal copyright theft and negotiate commercial deals with AI groups behind services such as ChatGPT or Claude. The BBC, The Financial Times and the Associated Press were already members.

Who joined the SPUR coalition on Tuesday?

The latest expansion doubles the number of publishers taking part. Other organizations that joined on Tuesday include US-based The Atlantic, Britain's The Observer newspaper and Radio France. Publishers' associations from Brazil, Japan, Argentina and Colombia also signed up.

David Buttle, co-founder and spokesperson for the SPUR Coalition, said in a statement: "There is rapidly growing momentum behind our effort to build a fairer, more sustainable information economy." He added: "We know that high-quality journalism forms the foundations of AI models yet, as it stands, publishers have no mechanism to ensure they are fairly compensated for their work."

AFP Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Fabrice Fries stressed that "each day, millions of people rely on AI assistants for information gathered and verified by news agency journalists." He added: "That original journalistic value must be recognized, credited and fairly compensated. Content traceability is not only a matter of intellectual property; it is also essential to maintaining public trust."

Buttle called AFP's decision to join "an important step in our growth". He said: "AFP is one of the world's leading news agencies, and its journalism is of tremendous value to those developing AI systems. Too often, that value is captured without permission or compensation."

Why are publishers pushing AI companies to pay for journalism?

Obtaining remuneration for their content is a vital issue for publishers, whose traditional advertising-based business model has been undercut by social networks. AI sites have also reduced the number of users going to internet news sites.

The New York Times sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, three years ago in a New York federal court. It alleges theft of its copyrighted material used to train the company's text-generating AI models. The newspaper has accused OpenAI of committing "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" by using millions of news articles.

OpenAI has since signed content licensing deals with some news publishers around the world. They include The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde in France and The Telegraph in Britain.