Washington (United States) (AFP) – Meta announced Friday it will integrate content from major news organizations into its artificial intelligence assistant to provide Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users with real-time information. The social media giant said Meta AI will offer breaking news, entertainment, and lifestyle stories when users ask news-related questions, drawing from partnerships with outlets including CNN, Fox News, Le Monde, People, and USA Today.
The feature will allow users to access “more diverse content sources” and receive links to partner websites to dive deeper into stories, Meta said in a blog post. The company stated that the expansion aims to make its AI assistant “more responsive, accurate, and balanced” by incorporating diverse viewpoints, acknowledging that “real-time events can be challenging for current AI systems to keep up with.” The initial partnerships span mainstream and conservative-leaning publications, including The Daily Caller and The Washington Examiner.
Meta indicated it plans to continue adding partnerships and develop new features as competition intensifies among technology firms to enhance the capabilities of their AI assistants. Meta AI is available across the company’s platforms, serving billions of users globally. The announcement comes as artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, increasingly move to incorporate live web content and news feeds.
OpenAI has deals with News Corp., Le Monde, The Washington Post, and Axel Springer, while The New York Times has partnered with Amazon, and Google has partnered with The Associated Press. Europe’s Mistral has partnered with Agence France-Presse. At the end of August, the startup Perplexity unveiled a subscription package called Comet Plus, named after its AI-infused internet browser, Comet, which gives access to partnered media content for $5 per month. Perplexity has committed to redistributing 80 percent of the revenue generated by Comet Plus to news publishers.
Despite these collaborations, several lawsuits brought by media outlets against AI companies are ongoing, notably that of The New York Times against OpenAI, which the newspaper accuses of using its articles without authorization and without compensation. In recent days, The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune joined The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post with their own lawsuits against Perplexity.
Meta has had a sometimes turbulent relationship with the news media over the years. The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg declared in 2024 that news was a very small share of user engagement on the company’s platforms and began shutting down the Facebook News tab in markets including the United States, Britain, and France. This also saw the end of multi-million-dollar deals with leading news organizations.
Zuckerberg also made the surprise decision in January to end Meta’s US fact-checking program, as he more closely aligned with the Trump administration’s antipathy toward establishment news. That program had employed third-party fact-checkers, many from news media organizations such as AFP, to identify misinformation disseminated on the platform.
The AI news came a day after Meta’s share price rose sharply on a report that the company is significantly cutting back on virtual reality investments as it pivots toward artificial intelligence.
© 2024 AFP
