A campaign by newspaper publishers for ‘fairness’ in regards to AI last week has elicited both support and criticism from the newstrade.

On Tuesday 25 February, nearly every national paper in the UK ran the same cover advert for the ‘Make it Fair’ campaign.

Publishers claim they are not being fairly compensated for their work by ‘big tech’ companies whose AI tools are using material without permission or payment.

Reacting to the blanket ads across their newsstands, retailers told Better Retailing publishers should remember the repeated cuts they have made to retailer margins.

Eugene Diamond, owner of Diamond’s News in Ballymena, County Antrim, said the margin cuts amount to “greed” by publishers over his more than 45 years in the trade.

He told Better Retailing: “Sadly, it’s dog eats dog and retailers have already been well chewed. I entered at 33.33% profit per copy and now some titles are as low as 17%.”

Not just publishers who should be paid fairly for their work

“Of course, publishers should be paid fairly for their work, as should everyone, including retailers,” said Mike Mitchelson, of Mitchelson News in Brampton Cumbria.

Industry bodies have shared these worries. The Fed’s news and operations director, Brian Murphy, added: “The Federation supports the intentions of the campaign and fully recognises that hard work and unique talent must be protected, but we must remind the industry to also take this opportunity to look inwards, too, and avoid letting history repeat itself – for many decades, the hard work done by our members has only ever resulted in percentage margin reductions.”

The cyan cover adverts on both national and regional titles, including the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Scotsman and The Sun, stated: ‘Make It Fair: The government wants to change the UK’s laws to favour big tech platforms so they can use British creative content to power their AI models without our permission or payment. Let’s protect the creative industries – it’s only fair.’

Campaign warns of ‘devastating’ impact

A spokesperson for the News Media Association explained: “The ‘Make It Fair’ campaign was developed to raise awareness among the British public about the existential threat posed to the creative industries from generative AI models, many of which scrape creative content from the internet without permission, acknowledgement and, critically, payment.”

They added the impact on creative industries would be “devastating”, and the front pages had been timed for the last day of the government’s consultation on AI and copyright. On the same day, a similar campaign in the music industry was launched in a show of unity.

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