[The Editors' Verdict] AI That Kills or Saves Journalism

The American online community Reddit receives $60 million (about 80 billion KRW) annually from Google. Reddit is a platform where netizens freely discuss various topics and share information. If you look for a similar service in Korea, you might think of DC Inside or Naver Cafe. The countless contents and conversations among users posted on Reddit become training data for Google's artificial intelligence (AI) models. The 80 billion KRW is exactly the cost for that.

‘AI search’ services like Perplexity are making a strong impact. These services generate and present answers when users search or ask questions. The traditional search method provided links to content matching the search keywords. For example, if you type the search term ‘generative AI’ on Google, news, blogs, videos related to generative AI are presented as search results. Users click on the titles of content they like and move to the web pages. In other words, it mediated users through links.

AI search is changing this method. You no longer have to struggle in a flood of links after searching. You can just ask as if speaking. If you ask, “What is the operating principle of generative AI?” the AI synthesizes and presents an appropriate answer. In the case of Perplexity, a list of related follow-up questions appears right below the answer. Clicking on these shows answers corresponding to the follow-up questions. Users thus stay longer within the search platform. From the perspective of news organizations, this is like a thunderbolt. The fact that there is no need to move elsewhere via links means a decrease in traffic directly coming to news organizations.

AI search also threatens the privileged position of news in the search market. In the existing search market, news from traditional media was guaranteed reliability in itself. It was distinguished from blogs and web pages of unknown sources. Most portals provided a separate ‘News’ tab on the search results page. In AI search, this preferential treatment disappears. News is treated as just one of the various information sources synthesized by AI. News is merely one component that makes up the search results.

That said, AI search platforms are not necessarily in an absolute ‘dominant’ position. Besides Perplexity, there are several AI search services. Google’s Overviews, OpenAI’s SearchGPT, and Naver’s Cue: are representative examples. Just as Google practically monopolized the existing search market with search quality, the AI search market is also likely to flow toward a winner-takes-all scenario based on ‘answer quality.’ The key in the early market stage is how to provide excellent answer quality, which depends on ‘data.’ AI search tends to provide general answers and median information. Paradoxically, this may cause bias and prejudice in the results. If AI had appeared in the geocentric era, it would certainly have said, “The sun revolves around the Earth.”

The importance of unique opinions and independent information grows even more in the AI search era. AI search platforms can maintain information diversity and balance by reflecting differentiated information in search results, thereby gaining competitiveness in search quality. Considering this, news organizations with the capability to produce original content rather than copying or imitating can greatly raise their value against AI search platforms. Like Reddit. Producing high-quality exclusive content, providing in-depth analysis, and establishing effective cooperation models with AI are challenges facing the news industry. Whether AI kills journalism or journalism survives through AI depends on the choices of the media.