To avoid its AI chatbot being "out of touch" on current events, Meta appears to be changing its strategy toward news media. According toAxios website reportedMeta has indicated that it has partnered with several news publishers.A commercial agreement was reachedIt will provide legitimate, real-time news content for its Meta AI service to better respond to user inquiries about current events and events.
Prior to this, Meta had entered into a multi-year paid news licensing agreement with Reuters in late October of last year, allowing Meta's AI service to cite Reuters reports and provide links to related articles when answering news-related questions. This latest announcement of partnerships with multiple news publishers is clearly aimed at giving Meta AI more opportunities.Reference volume of news materials.
Including CNN, Fox News, and Le Monde, spanning the political spectrum
The list of partners reportedly is quite extensive, covering media outlets from different perspectives and regions. These include mainstream US media outlets USA Today and CNN, entertainment media People, and the authoritative French media Le Monde.
The list of partners also includes several prominent conservative media outlets, such as Fox News, The Daily Caller, and the Washington Examiner. This demonstrates Meta's attempt to achieve a degree of balance in the training materials and information sources for its AI, preventing the chatbot from exhibiting bias when answering sensitive cultural or political questions.
Pay for "real-time" data by including a link.
According to the agreement, this will be a multi-year cooperation contract, in which Meta will pay a fee in exchange for the right to use this content (the specific amount is not disclosed).
More importantly, the contract stipulates that Meta's chatbot must provide a link out to the original article when answering news-related queries. This could potentially provide some additional traffic boosting for news publishers whose traffic is dwindling.
From "refusing to pay" to "paying for data," AI has changed the game.
This move has attracted attention because Meta has taken a rather tough and indifferent stance toward the news industry in recent years.
Looking back at 2022, Meta...Stop paying news content fees to U.S. publishersSubsequently, in multiple countriesCompletely disable the Facebook News tabIn some places, such as Canada, news links were even blocked due to legal issues. At the time, Meta's position was that "news contributes little to user engagement on its social media platforms."
However, with the intensification of competition in generative AI, the situation has clearly changed. To reduce hallucinations in AI models and enhance their ability to answer questions about current events using RAG retrieval, high-quality, timely, and credible data has become a market necessity. This has forced Meta to return to the negotiating table and establish partnerships with news organizations, reflecting the renewed emphasis placed on "high-quality content" by tech giants in the AI era.
