And now it intends to pursue a similar deal with the AI companies, some of whom are also the tech giants that gave in before.
Of course, Thomson also added a few linguistic flourishes, which have been a trademark of his tenure atop the media company. “We have been characteristically candid about the AI challenge to publishers and to intellectual property. It is essentially a tech triptych,” Thomson told analysts. “In the first instance, our content is being harvested and scraped and otherwise ingested to train AI engines. Ingestion should not lead to indigestion. Secondly, individual stories are being surfaced in specific searches.
But he also noted that the technology presented not only “a new stream of revenues” from AI players, but also allows the company “to reduce costs across the business.” “From the philosophical to the functional, there is no doubt that AI articulations will affect most sections of most companies, whether it be customer service, subscription management, chatbots, chitchatbots, text to audio and audio to video,” Thomson said, adding that the “efficiencies will be exponential.”“If fake news and deep fakes are a concern, the potential for sophisticated forgeries, for counterfeit content is almost endless,” Thomson added on the call.