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A.G. Sulzberger: AI answers depend on reporting

The New York Times publisher talks with Wired about the value of first-hand reporting for artificial intelligence and the escalating attacks on the free press

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Press Release | The New York Times

On Wired’s “The Big Interview” podcast, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said firsthand, on-the-ground reporting is an essential service both for an informed public and also for the future of AI tools.

“Is AI going to go to the front lines of the Ukraine conflict and show what’s happening there?,” Sulzberger said. “Is AI going to spend years building the sources that we need to finally get Trump’s taxes and provide the fullest picture of Trump’s wealth and the conflicts inherent in that? AI can’t do any of those things. We need journalists for it, and AI needs journalists for it.”

Sulzberger also discussed the administration’s escalating attacks on the press, the news industry’s battles with AI companies and the sustainability of the news business.

  • “In every administration, we will publish something that the president of the United States doesn’t want the American people to know. Upsetting a president of either party is nothing new to us. What is new is that the administration defied many of its own standards and practices and explicit guidelines to very rapidly, in the course of a day or two, serve subpoenas on these reporters. They went straight to the homes of the reporters in an obvious attempt to intimidate them.”
  • “Silicon Valley has tried to portray our lawsuit as anti-tech. It is not anti-tech. It is anti-theft. … This is not about money. This is about the ability to sustain essential work.”
  • “We’ve reached this amazing milestone. We hit 13 million subscribers. We’re aiming for 15. And that sounds like a big number, until you remember that Netflix is over 300 million and you have another half dozen with 100, 200 million subscribers. And actually, it’s all the way down the list to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has more subscribers than The New York Times. So we are simultaneously the largest player in our beleaguered industry. But what we need is the entire industry to be much bigger. If you’re going to say that The New York Times is the country’s leading news organization, do we really think that the country’s leading news organization should have fewer subscribers than an anime streaming service?”

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