AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Lawmakers in California recently came up with a bold new proposal requiring Google to pay news outlets for their content. The legislation was born out of a desire to protect journalists and their outlets from tech companies profiting off their work, but now that legislation is being cast aside. Instead, Google and the state of California have promised to pay $250 million over the next five years to Californian news outlets and to support AI technology intended to assist journalists. It's a move that has inspired questions from journalists and their audiences. And here to explain this deal is a journalist herself, Laurel Rosenhall, who's reporting about this for the LA Times. Welcome.
LAUREL ROSENHALL: Thanks for having me.
CHANG: Thanks for being with us. OK, so tell us a little about the history behind all of this. Like, what happened between Google and California lawmakers that brought us here to this compromise?
ROSENHALL: Well, news outlets everywhere have been really struggling with how to adjust to the changing environment, with how people get their news and consume their news. And so there has been a push in the last couple of years to make some of these tech platforms pay for the content that they distribute. And increasingly, when people search something, they can display an answer that is pulled right out of a news article but without paying for the journalists that actually reported that information. And so last year a bill was introduced in the California legislature. It's gone through, you know, a lot of changes and negotiations and wound up with this agreement that was announced yesterday, which is actually to set the legislation aside and go with this sort of handshake agreement instead.
CHANG: Yeah. Let's talk a little more about this handshake agreement because it's gotten a lot of vocal criticism, especially from journalists. Explain. What are the questions and concerns that journalists have been expressing?
ROSENHALL: Mainly their concern that Google is not being asked to put enough money into the fund that's going to support newsrooms. But the real big change here is that the agreement includes this artificial intelligence component that hadn't been part of discussions - at least publicly had not been part of discussions over the last two years.
CHANG: I was just going to ask you, do we have any semblance of clarity about what this whole AI technology component is going to mean, what it's going to look like? - because Google seems really interested in getting journalists to adopt their AI technology.
ROSENHALL: Right now there's no details available on that. It's definitely a line of inquiry that we will be pursuing. I think you could, you know, imagine scenarios where AI could be used to help journalists access information in the public realm. I think where some of the fears is coming up is whether it's going to be used in a way that would replace journalists' work.
CHANG: Right.
ROSENHALL: And so that is a concern that we're hearing from the News Media Guild that represents journalists.
CHANG: I am curious. Based on your reporting, is there a legitimate fear that AI could totally replace the work of journalists and that this step that Google is taking is a step towards something like that?
ROSENHALL: To the extent that journalists are doing work that is reporting on things that is already known information, I think that that is a understandable fear. But I always come back to this. The highest and best use of our profession as journalists is to discover new information and put it into the world, information that wouldn't be known if we weren't doing our jobs, asking questions and holding powerful figures accountable.
CHANG: I love that answer.
ROSENHALL: So there's really no way that a computer can do that.
CHANG: That is Laurel Rosenhall of the LA Times. Thank you so much.
ROSENHALL: Thanks for having me.
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