Some of the biggest news organisations in the UK have come together to fight for shared AI standards. The newsrooms launching SPUR – the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition are the Financial Times, Guardian, Telegraph, BBC and Sky News. The news was first revealed by Charlotte Tobbit for Press Gazette.
In a joint statement, the bosses said:
Across the industry, our reporting, our archives, our original content, have become foundational training material for AI systems. This material has been scraped, copied and reused with no common standards to enable permission or payment, weakening the economic model that supports journalism. The lack of transparency about how AI answers are created risks eroding public trust in both the news and the technologies used to access it.
They added that the purpose of the organisation will be “to establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks that ensure AI developers can access high quality, reliable journalism in legitimate, responsible and convenient ways, while guaranteeing that publishers retain practical control of their content and receive fair value when it is used.”
The founding five urged others to join them. This is a hugely important step at a crucial moment in the development of AI and its interactions with news. Yes, journalism has already been used as training material. But there is a determination to have at least some control over what happens next. I’ve heard it discussed at various points in conferences and other types of summits.
Media organisations gave this up in the social media boom. They do not want to make the same mistake again.
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