Election predictions misfire again | FT policy chief says no 'genuine choice' on Google scraping
And The New York Times and New York Daily News say OpenAI has used "millions" of their stories for ChatGPT's training data
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All journalists should repeat 100 times today: "I cannot predict the future."
And Rory Stewart should, frankly, retire from public life and devote himself to private charitable work, possibly volunteering at Gamblers Anonymous.
Stewart said this week on The Rest is Politics podcast that the betting markets had got the US election prediction dead wrong and even said that, given the generous odds, he would stake £1,000 on a Kamala Harris victory.
The US presidential election should be a humbling moment for media commentators and their credulous belief in the work of opinion polling companies who appear to have been off by quite a wide margin again.
The safest thing with journalism is to say what you can see and leave predictions to the horoscopes section.
Today we also report on FT public affairs chief Matt Rogerson's letter to Parliament in which he reveals the extent to which Google is now abusing its market position in its eagerness to expand into AI.
The search giant copies publishers' content to produce AI summaries which reduce the need for readers to click through to our websites and there is very little we can do about it. Rogerson warns that blocking the Google bots also removes websites from search, making them largely invisible to 90% of the UK population.
And also in the world of AI we report on the latest from the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. The publishers of The New York Times and New York Daily News said millions of news articles have already been taken without permission by the ChatGPT creator to train its dataset.
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On Press Gazette
US election result leaves media pundits and pollsters with red faces… again
This morning Stewart said: “When a result happens you rewrite history. If she was currently winning we would have a very good answer for why she was winning.”
News organisations are forced to accept Google AI crawlers, says FT policy chief
Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the FT and former Guardian Media Group director of public policy, argued that Google’s “social contract” with publishers – through which it provided value to the industry by sending traffic to their sites – has been broken.
‘Millions’ of NYT and NY Daily News stories taken by OpenAI for training data
The New York Times and The New York Daily News are now asking for a court order requiring OpenAI to “identify and admit” which of their copyrighted content was used to train each of its large language models between GPT-1 and GPT-4o.
News in brief
Drop Site News has obtained an internal email, sent on Sunday, in which Los Angeles Times proprietor Patrick Soon-Shiong indicates Gaza did inform his decision not to let the paper endorse a candidate, despite his earlier claims to the contrary. (Drop Site News)
Journalists from Puck, Politico and Axios reportedly had their access to the Trump election party revoked over unflattering coverage. (The New York Times)
The Government has said it will reform the fast-track courts process Single Justice Procedure after a Standard investigation. The Magistrates Association says this should include making provision for sittings to be observable by accredited journalists. (The Standard)
This week on Press Gazette:
US election: Grassroots political reporting back in fashion says Semafor’s Ben Smith
US election: Speed and fairness are key tactics for fast-growing Newsweek
New York Times-owned The Athletic reports quarterly profit for first time
Top 50 UK news websites in September: Leading publishers see sharp traffic drop
Metropolis employee passport and bank details compromised in cyberattack
Listen to our latest podcast
Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford and reporter Bron Maher provide an insider take on three of the hottest issues in news media: how did the Washington Post handle its election endorsement so badly? Why are Guardian and Observer journalists set to go on strike? And what can publishers do about the onslaught of generative AI bots harvesting their content without permission?