Generative AI at Newsflare

The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence, or 'Gen AI', is part of a new wave of technology innovation that has the potential to impact all of our lives and businesses in radical and transformative ways. These new tools can generate text, images, speech, music and video from text or voice prompts by a user. The current capabilities are already impressive and they are developing fast.

When we work with technology at Newsflare, we do so in a way that puts our values first. We want to use new technologies to benefit our filmers, buyers and business alike and to deliver our mission of 'connecting storytellers with moments that matter' in new and exciting ways.

At Newsflare, we believe that Gen AI will provide us a significant opportunity to deepen and amplify our mission, enabling us to deliver more value to both our buyers and our filmers and the audiences who ultimately engage with the video that is licensed via our platform. For instance by embracing the multi-language capabilities of large language models to make our output more accessible to markets preferring a different language to the source material. Also, we see the potential to generate voice overs with synthetic audio as one of the ways Gen AI can help our teams to work more effectively and efficiently.

Alongside these opportunities, it is already clear that Gen AI poses significant risks if not harnessed properly. These include ethical issues, legal and copyright challenges, and significant risks around misinformation and bias.

These risks are real and cannot be underestimated. This wave of innovation demands vision and vigilance in equal measure. We believe a responsible approach to using this technology can help mitigate some of these risks and open the door to safe experimentation. With all this in mind, in this positioning statement I'm outlining the principles that will shape Newsflare's approach to working with Gen AI:

• 1. We will always act in the best interests of our filmers and our buyers - we will explore how we can harness Generative AI to strengthen our mission and deliver greater value to our marketplace stakeholders. At the same time, we will seek to mitigate the challenges Generative AI may create, including trust in media, protection of copyright and content discovery. We will also seek to work with industry partners to champion safety and transparency in the development of Gen AI and protection against social harms.
• 2. What is clear from research projects conducted by Reuters and YouTube, is that audiences increasingly want transparency about whether the content they’re seeing and hearing is altered or synthetic. Like these organisations, Newsflare will require its contributors to disclose when realistic content – content a viewer could easily mistake for a real person, place, scene, or event – is made with altered or synthetic media, including generative AI.
• 3. We will be transparent and clear with audiences when Generative AI output features in our content and services. Human oversight will be an important step in the publication of Generative AI content, whether that be content presented on the Newsflare Marketplace Platform or in Newsflare Studios published output appearing on social media or television.
• 4. At the same time, we are taking steps to safeguard the interests of our filmers as this new technology evolves. For example, we do not believe the ‘scraping’ of proprietary data without our permission in order to train Gen AI models is in the interest of the rights holders that we represent and we are currently working with industry stakeholders to agree a more structured and sustainable approach with technology companies. That’s why we have taken steps to prevent web crawlers from accessing the Newsflare.com website.
• 5. We see the ethical training of Gen AI as something to be encouraged and a significant new licensing opportunity for our contributors. Whilst our Terms of Service already grant Newsflare the right to license content uploaded to the platform for the purpose of AI training, we recognise that using data to train Gen AI is a topic about which people feel differently. Accordingly, we are granting our contributors the opportunity to 'opt out' of having their content licensed for AI training purposes.

Innovation has always been at the heart of Newsflare, from how we source video to how we rights clear, curate, license and publish video. With the safeguards in place and with clear guidance to our contributors, buyers and team members, we will embrace the advantages of Generative AI whilst carefully managing the risks that come along with its adoption so that it too may play a role in the growth and development of our business.

Newsflare
16/07/2024