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Google claims fine-tuning has 'no realistic prospect of harm' to publishers
Plus we speak to Puck co-founder behind new food media brand with $2.5m seed investment and eight staff
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Welcome to the Press Gazette Future of Media US newsletter on Friday, 24 April.
📲 I knew about AI training and I knew about RAG, but 'fine-tuning' had until now largely passed me by.
So I learned a lot from news publishers' submissions to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority relating to Google's conduct, calling for specific fine-tuning controls.
Google told the CMA there is "no realistic prospect of harm to publishers in respect of training/fine-tuning of AI models for search and search generative AI features".
Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford described it as “the giant anaconda that has just eaten a goat issuing assurances that its lunch will be absolutely fine”.
In fact it seems this is pretty urgent as the trend is moving towards more fine-tuning rather than RAG. As Guardian Media Group put it: this risks "devaluation of emerging and valuable RAG markets for news content".
My round-up of these new submissions to the CMA also includes the need to get a move on and not wait a year before the watchdog decides whether to force Google to pay for content.
Publishers also emphasised the huge damage done to them by Google's site reputation abuse policy. They asked: why can Google arbitrarily do this with barely a functioning complaints process in place?
Although this is a UK regulatory process, the potential impact of the decision could be wide-ranging. The US News/Media Alliance and News Media Canada both think so, and submitted their own views to the CMA as well.
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🥘 New email-based media brands launch pretty much every week staffed by one or two journalists funding themselves in the hope subscriptions revenue will come further down the line.
Two of the three founders of Caper have come from Puck, and they’re bringing a similar model of journalists having equity in the business and feeling invested through bonuses driven by subscription revenue.
Max Tcheyan, who spoke to my colleague Alice Brooker, said he is also bringing his experience from The Athletic which doubled down on sports media that people would pay for rather than click-based hits.
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📰In the news this week:
Politics News Site NOTUS to Become ‘The Star’ - The New York Times
Getty must sell Shutterstock editorial business, says UK antitrust watchdog - Financial Times
NPR receives $113 million in charitable gifts, including $80 million from Connie Ballmer - CBS News
FBI Director Kash Patel files $250m lawsuit against The Atlantic magazine - BBC News
The Onion relaunches Alex Jones’ Info Wars as a satirical site - The Independent