麻豆传媒

There are two stories in the news today that caught my attention: 1) News Corp is suing Perplexity.ai for aggregating and surfacing WSJ and NYPost content without permission or payment. 2) xAI launched its , which reminded me that X changed its terms of services last week, informing users that it can (and most likely will) use any content posted on X (formerly Twitter) to train its AI models.

Does this mean that when a news organization or publisher freely posts its content on X, they are granting permission for their content to be used to train AI... but it's not okay when another company (like Perplexity) scrapes their content off of the public web?

Is this a distinction without a difference? X is a private company, and no one is forcing publishers to post their content on X. If a publisher does post, they are (by default) agreeing to the terms of service, so they are giving X the right to use their data as X sees fit. On the other hand, when you publish something on the public web, it is (by default) public. The only available protections are applicable copyright law and your published terms of service.

If this sounds subtle and confusing… that's because it is. Some lawyers will tell you that News Corp has a right to sue and (considering the dire consequences of failure) must win. Others will tell you that big AI (with virtually unlimited budgets) needs to win to pave the way for whatever comes after link-based search.

As I've said too many times, this is "the" fight. The future of the web's entire economic engine is at stake. What phoenix might emerge from the ashes of clickable links and copyright protection? Advertorial summaries? Link-attributed summaries? Clickable summaries? (But clickable to where?) Autonomous agents that just do what you want without requiring interim steps to achieve your desired outcome? The list is long. I'm interested in your best guess.

As always your thoughts and comments are both welcome and encouraged. Just reply to this email. -s

P.S. Ping me if you're going to be at the ANA in Orlando this week. I'll be there on Wednesday and Thursday: I'm keynoting about AI, then facilitating some Q&A.