Artificial Intelligence: News Media

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Black of Brentwood]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of artificial intelligence on the sustainability and reliability of the news media.

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, in begging leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, I declare my interest as deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)]

Trustworthy journalism plays a vital role in our democracy. Rapid recent developments in generative AI pose both significant risks and opportunities for news media. We are engaging with press stakeholders on this. The Media Minister and the Technology Secretary each held roundtables earlier this year with publishers and broadcasters to discuss the issues around AI in journalism. The Government will support our news media to capitalise on the huge potential benefits of the technology while mitigating its risks.

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, AI poses an existential threat to independent media because of the way it scrapes their high-quality content without either attribution or payment to those who created it, which is an act of theft directly threatening the provision of quality news and the jobs of thousands of reporters. Is the Minister aware that research by market leader Cloudflare shows that, for example, for every 73,000 pages of content scraped by Anthropic’s AI crawlers from news providers, there is just one single referral back to publishers’ websites? Does she realise that without this vital traffic, publishers cannot sell advertising or subscriptions, and their businesses become unsustainable? The free press cannot wait years for copyright reform because there is nothing left to protect. We were promised immediate action on this issue when the data Act went through; when will we get some of it?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

We want to get this right and for AI to work for everyone. All our work is around protecting existing rights for creators and the press and ensuring that AI creates new revenue streams for them. We are carefully reviewing all the responses to our consultation to ensure that any proposals taken forward properly support both the AI and creative sectors, including the media.