Finding a Balance as AI Advances

Brussels was the location of our third Thomson Talks with Madhav Chinnappa held on 25 June 2024, focused on the specific subject of AI/News & Regulation. Four kick-off speakers framed the topic from their respective perspectives before the open-ended discussion took place.  

 The event was held under the Chatham House Rule so where someone is named, it is with their explicit permission.

• Claus Grewenig, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at RTL Deutschland  co-hosted and shared the perspective of a large broadcasting and streaming company’s as well as a news organisation’s perspective around:
• despite the pros of AI, the need for a robust (copyright) framework to protect and negotiate when content is used
• the need for improvements in levelling the playing field and findability for value media
• a focus on financial sustainability of the media sector (e.g. no ad restrictions)
• Dan Nechita, Head of Cabinet for Dragos Tudorache, MEP with Renew Europe, spoke about how the European Parliament (EP) insisted on provisions for transparency regarding input data to increase our knowledge of how models are trained, about how AI labelling helps combat disinformation and electoral interference, and about the next steps in the AI Act implementation, for which the European Commission (EC), and in particular the AI Office, is in charge.
• Kilian Gross, Head of Unit in the AI Office at the EC followed with outlining how the AI Office is a transversal organisation, not just a regulator and is trying to balance innovation and regulation while being inclusive, fast and conscious that actions need to be done with the global context in mind.
• Ariane Bernard, a news industry and digital innovation leader who currently advises many News CEOs, spoke about the reality from “the trenches” where her current clients often express anxiety about the lack of clarity about where things are going which has led many news organisations to be slow or to fall back on a dependency on Big Tech so as not to fall foul of any interpretation of regulation.

Postive role for AI? 

Participants expressed a series of concerns about the AI world in terms of media sustainability, trust and disinformation as well as copyright concerns. There were many open questions about how regulation could or would play a positive force in the ecosystem overall.

It was acknowledged that AI tools could be positive and help freedom of expression and legitimate news organisations but this was tempered by concerns of how bad actors would use these tools and ignore any regulations. This led to a discussion about journalism's role in explaining AI to a wider audience, while things are moving so quickly - no easy task!

Sonja Schwetje of RTL Deutschland observed that while most media organisations have shown an immense effort catering to the preferences of younger audiences in terms of how and where to provide their content, there remains an ambiguity between balanced, impartial journalistic information and polarising, opinion-based content, with the latter being promoted much more via algorithms.