Pidato Ketua Dewan Redaksi The New York Times: Bagaimana media bertahan di era AI? Saya mendesak industri untuk bangkit melawan

The New York Times Chairman and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered an opening speech at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference in Marseille on June 1, characterizing the behavior of AI companies using news to train models as "blatant intellectual property theft," revealing that The Times has spent over $20 million suing OpenAI and Perplexity, and calling on the global media industry "to no longer remain silent."
（Background: CNN sues Perplexity for copyright infringement: 17,000 articles copied verbatim, bypassing paywalls）
（Additional background: Google Search undergoes the biggest transformation in history: repositioning Search as an AI-powered one-stop portal）

Table of Contents

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• Four raw materials, three paid, one stolen
• $11 trillion industry, 0.5% to content creators
• One newspaper closes every three days
• "Killing itself with its own copies"
• "AI companies are closer to Napster, not libraries"
• Media too silent, too passive, too scattered
• News must be uniquely attractive by itself

Summary Highlights

• A.G. Sulzberger accuses AI companies of "blatant theft of intellectual property" at the Marseille WAN-IFRA conference, with The Times having spent over $20 million suing OpenAI and Perplexity
• Six leading AI companies have a combined market value of $11 trillion, but less than 0.5% of their investments go to content creators; in 20 years, the US has lost 75% of its journalists and closed over 3,000 newspapers
• Sulzberger calls on global media to unite in pushing legislation, requiring AI crawlers to identify themselves, and compares AI companies to "pirate music platform Napster"

Earlier this month, at the Marseille WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference in France, A.G. Sulzberger, Chairman and Publisher of The New York Times, did not exchange pleasantries with the audience. Instead, he directly addressed the global media industry with accusations against AI.

"Tech giants are strip-mining news websites without permission or compensation."

The title of his speech was "AI, the News Industry, and the Uncertain Future of the Public Square." Over 40 minutes, Sulzberger dissected the issue very clearly. Here is his argument, in his own words.

Four raw materials, three paid, one stolen

Sulzberger breaks down the construction of AI models into four raw materials.

• Talent (engineers)
• Computing power (infrastructure)
• Energy (electricity)
• "Data"

He pauses notably on the word "data," because in the context of AI companies, "data" truly means books, movies, music, and news reports.

The first three raw materials are purchased at market-high prices. Engineers earn over a million dollars annually, data centers and electricity contracts cost billions. But for the fourth, they choose not to pay.

He quotes OpenAI’s own words: "It is impossible to train state-of-the-art AI models without using copyrighted material."

Microsoft’s vice president also admits: "High-quality content can significantly improve response quality."

Sulzberger makes it clear: "What determines AI quality is not architecture, not hyperparameters, not optimization choices. It’s your dataset, and nothing else."

AI operators know news is valuable; they admit it, and then they take it.

$11 trillion industry, 0.5% to content creators

Sulzberger lays out the figures to highlight the contrast.

Six leading AI companies have a combined market value of $11 trillion, three times France’s GDP. By 2025, private AI investments in the US will reach $350 billion, still accelerating in 2026. The global creative industry employs over 50 million people, with an annual output of about $12 trillion.

Yet, the amount these AI companies allocate to compensate content creators is less than 0.5% of their investments.

He characterizes this as "blatant intellectual property theft on an unprecedented scale."

He then shifts the focus to his own newspaper, noting that in 2025, The New York Times published nearly 500,000 articles, costing over $200 million. With over 70 reporters stationed in Ukraine, over 17.5 million original articles have been accumulated over 175 years.

The Times is the largest single proprietary content source in major AI training datasets.

One newspaper closes every three days

Next comes a series of numbers that require no explanation.

Over the past twenty years, the US has lost 75% of its journalists. More than 3,000 newspapers have shut down, and now one closes every three days. Newspaper ad revenue has plummeted 80%. Meta’s ad revenue is eight times that of all newspapers combined.

AI search accelerates this depletion. "Getting a Google user to click a link now is ten times harder than ten years ago." Traffic sent to news sites by other AI models is 96% lower than Google Search, and after AI competition intensified, traffic to major newspapers has dropped over 45%.

Sulzberger says: "I worry we are heading toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists, fewer and fewer doing those costly, difficult original reports."

The decline of local news is not just a commercial issue; research shows that communities losing local news experience decreased trust, reduced civic participation, increased isolation, and rising corruption. He calls this "a tragedy of the public sphere."

"Killing itself with its own copies"

Sulzberger quotes Canadian author Margaret Atwood to describe the current situation: "Killing itself with its own copies."

The irony of this metaphor is that the "copies" are often not even good.

Research by the European Broadcasting Union finds that nearly 50% of mainstream AI assistants give "seriously distorted" facts when answering news questions. Google and Apple have made "significant errors" rewriting news headlines with AI. Perplexity’s bot once falsely claimed conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated; Grok claimed he was still alive.

The most absurd detail is that when Microsoft launched its AI assistant Copilot, the disclaimer read: "For entertainment or reference purposes only. Do not rely on Copilot for important decisions."

A product claiming to replace news, yet telling users not to take it seriously.

"AI companies are closer to Napster, not libraries"

Sulzberger chooses a metaphor everyone understands.

"These companies adopt a parasitic stance, more like Napster, the old illegal music platform."

He then names them one by one.

OpenAI and Microsoft are the main targets of The Times’ lawsuit, filed in December 2023, which has been ongoing for over two and a half years and cost more than $20 million. Most news organizations lack the resources for such a prolonged battle.

Meta trained large language models using "a notorious illegal pirated book database."

Perplexity "openly disregards" website directives forbidding crawling, using "concealed, unannounced crawlers" to bypass paywalls and distribute content.

Anthropic, "often touted as a company committed to ethical AI," refuses to pay for news.

Google increasingly answers user questions directly in search results rather than directing to original news sources. Even so, Google’s referral traffic remains the highest among all AI platforms, not because it does better, but because "competitors are worse."

Sulzberger concludes with a number: about 30% of AI crawlers violate explicit website access restrictions.

Media too silent, too passive, too scattered

In the latter half of his speech, he shifts from accusations to calls for mobilization.

"Our industry is too silent, too passive, too scattered in the face of AI revolution abuses."

He proposes four actions:

• First: Uphold intellectual property rights and insist these rights be respected
• Second: Handle AI licensing agreements carefully, ensuring fair compensation and meaningful control
• Third: Push legislators to establish a four-layer defense, including robust IP protections, mandatory crawler identification, transparency in news usage, and legal accountability for AI-generated defamatory content
• Fourth: Cross-industry unity, pooling resources, submitting amicus briefs, and collaborating with film, music, and publishing industries

"We cannot let AI cheerleaders dominate the public dialogue."

"We cannot stand by as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle our rights to control."

News must be uniquely attractive by itself

Sulzberger does not place all the blame on AI; he also issues a new-era demand to his fellow media peers.

He says over-reliance on platform traffic is a dead end; media must rely on themselves. "In a world mediated by AI, to become a destination, your news must be uniquely attractive by itself."

He suggests four responsible uses of AI: innovative but cautious, building direct relationships with readers instead of relying on platforms, focusing on original reporting rather than aggregation or clickbait, and explaining to the public why news matters.

He also makes a distinction: "I am not saying AI, or the tech giants controlling this technology, are inherently bad or evil."

"But shutting out a powerful new technology is a failed strategy."

This means media should embrace AI advancements.

His final words are quiet, without anger, only a warning:

Even if everything seems fine now, remember, these early waves herald an impending tsunami. We cannot be so naive again. Information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive, because it is too valuable.

On average, every three days, a media outlet around the world permanently closes its doors.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does A.G. Sulzberger accuse AI companies of stealing?

Sulzberger accuses AI companies of using copyrighted content like news, books, and music without permission or payment to train models, calling it "blatant intellectual property theft." The Times has spent over $20 million suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity.

How does Sulzberger suggest news media respond to AI threats?

He proposes four actions: uphold intellectual property rights, carefully handle AI licensing agreements, push for legislation including mandatory crawler identification and transparency, and foster cross-industry collaboration. He also recommends focusing on creating "uniquely attractive" original content.