The AI ​​revolution: the editors are more prepared than they believe

Los Digital editors They have faced numerous disruptions: from social media algorithms that have redefined interaction with audiences to updates in search engines that traffic strategies have changed. The generative AI is marking another paradigm change, but many editors have already prepared, almost without realizing it, thanks to strategies that have been implementing time: Diversification of income sources, loyalty of audiences and a proactive position in the protection of intellectual property.

As a result, future vision editors will probably avoid the worst scenarios of the impact of AI. They could even benefit, taking advantage of technology to increase content production and distribution, while closing mutually advantageous agreements with data avid companies for training. Meanwhile, those editors who do not yet feel prepared must look at their most proactive colleagues and follow their strategies, since the ability to take advantage of AI while minimizing their risks will make the difference between moving forward or falling behind.

How can editors face the disruption of AI from a strength position?

There is no doubt that conversational interfaces and search engines promoted by AI – like Chatgpt, Google Gemini, Deepseek and Perplexity – will continue to reduce search traffic towards editors. At the same time, the integration of advertising inventory into these platforms will further increase the competition for advertising budgets.

However, this is nothing more than an acceleration of the changes in the discovery of content that have been taking years. Before the launch of AI overViews in May 2024, more than half (58,5 %) of Google searches did not generate any click. The most cunning editors understood the signal and began to move away from a model focused on SEO, betting on a broader strategy that covers all platforms where their current and potential audiences spend time.

While changing course always involves a challenge, freeing yourself from searching for search traffic can be an advantage from the editorial point of view. Instead of adapting the content to a single algorithm that is also constantly changing, the most vision editors are exploring how to develop or adapt their content for video, podcast, social networks and other formats.

This is an area in which AI tools can do much of heavy work. The reuse of content for different formats and platforms is precisely the type of tedious task that can slow down human teams, but that AI can manage in seconds. In addition, editors can take advantage of AI to analyze and categorize their files, drastically improving the search within their own sites and allowing their audiences to rediscover file content. It is a key opportunity in a digital ecosystem that is usually obsessed with immediacy.

Beyond the technological and media changes, the deepest transformation in the digital edition has been the step of capturing the attention of sporadic visitors from the search engines to loyalty a compromised audience – and in many cases, of payment. This not only reduces the dependence on advertising income, but also increases its value, since a faithful audience is a valuable source of First-Party and Zero-Party Data: the first refers to the data collected with user’s consent, while the second encompasses the information that the users themselves directly provide through surveys and forms.

In short, the strategies that the most successful editors have implemented to adapt to the fall in organic traffic and the fragmentation of the audience will also help them mitigate the possible negative effects of AI. The most vulnerable will be those that were already clinging to obsolete growth and monetization models, and now they will have to change their way urgently.

Editors must recognize and take advantage of their strength position

The legal system advances at a much more slow pace than technological development, which has allowed many language models developers to have treated copyright legislation with questionable flexibility. Before concepts such as Fair Use were subjected to trial in court, large intellectual property volumes were extracted from the open website (and even downloaded from torrents) for use in training data, without the permission of the rights holders. This becomes a legal problem at the time such data is used for commercial purposes.

However, this legal vacuum period is coming to an end. At the time of writing this article, there are judicial cases under the world among rights holders – including numerous editors – and developers of AI. Soon a legal consensus will begin to take shape. At the same time, regulators are preparing laws that will define under what circumstances the rights holders must be compensated. During this process and beyond, editors must adopt a proactive position to protect their intellectual property.

Giving white letter to AI developers to use extracted content without permission from digital editors would undermine the fundamentals of copyright. Therefore, the most likely regulatory scenario is that the editors are paid – perhaps even retroactively, depending on the level of transparency required on training data – due to the use of their content.

To advance this issue, many IA publishers and developers have already closed trade agreements for the AI ​​products content and training data. The most media example is the News Corp Agreement with Openai, estimated in 250 million dollars. In the Spanish -speaking sphere, Hurry medium It has followed a similar path when associating with OpenAi to allow Chatgpt users to access high quality content of media such as the country, five days, AS and Huffpost.

The reality is that IA companies need editors. If a chatbot cannot respond to “what is happening today?”, It is incomplete in its essential function for users. AI cannot perform news collection, reports or research journalism; You cannot write product analysis, travel guides or lifestyle content. In short, you cannot create anything really new or interact with the offline world. In order for a AI product to fulfill its assistant function, it needs to be updated on events and trends, and must offer the content generated by humans that the public really wishes to consume.

The editors also have a key advantage: their editorial standards and deontological codes guarantee greater precision in the information. The so -called “hallucinations” have proven to be a persistent problem in generative AI and, the more time passes, the more obvious it seems that this failure is inherent in technology. This compromises its reliability as an information tool.

A recent BBC study Analyzed 100 responses generated by AI chatbots using BBC content as a source. The results were alarming: 51 % of the answers presented important problems and 19 % contained factual errors.

History has shown that people often prioritize comfort on quality, but the responses generated by AI will not be able to hide indefinitely after “developing” notices before their usefulness is seriously questioned. These services will have to prioritize precision, which could imply cite and directly attribute their sources instead of synthesizing answers, especially in the case of current news.

There is no doubt that digital editors will face significant disruption in the coming years, and not all effects will be positive. However, the editorial industry has survived – and evolved – through numerous technological changes over time. If the companies of AI want to remain a relevant actor in the way the audiences consume means, ignore or harm the editors and the creative industries would be a fatal error. Cooperation is the only possible way.

Written by Daniel Gozlan, Country Director Spain of Ogury