FILE - People are reflected in a window of a hotel at the Davos Promenade in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 15, 2024.
Randall Lane, chief content officer of Forbes Media, called the dispute an “inflection point” in the conversation about AI. “The whole thing was very disingenuous. And what we didn’t hear was, ‘Oops, yeah we messed that one up and we need to do better,’” he said. “Instead, it was just putting out more content, little tweaks to the model and treating journalism like it’s just a commodity to be manufactured.”
The company sells a subscription for premium features and is planning to start an advertising-based service as it grows its user base. She pointed to Google’s new, Perplexity-like approach that summarizes answers based on information pulled from crawling the web, as an example. That, too, led to false information and forced“But their whole model of advertising is based on sending people to websites,” she said in an email. “Why will people go to websites if they can have the one-stop-shop of the answer in the AI output?”