In the U.S., when a publisher signs a licensing deal with an AI company, newsroom staffers don't get a cut. Many newsrooms have licensed their content to OpenAI in bulk, for example. A staff reporter's stories can be used as training data for the latest GPT model, or may surface in ChatGPT's response to a user question. Does that reporter deserve to be compensated directly for how their work is being used by OpenAI? In France, the answer is, increasingly, yes.
Answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are replacing traditional search traffic with direct answers, depriving publishers of the revenue they would generate from attracting those visitors to their websites. The shift mirrors the decoupling that occurred with Google News two decades ago, when aggregators began to sever the direct publisher-reader relationship, reshaping the economics of digital media, according to Felix Danczak, head of AI and growth at the venture capital firm Pembroke VCT.
