AI treats publisher content as interchangeable raw material

AI does not want publisher content as it exists; it wants "information stripped to its raw material" that it can mix with other content into something new, writes Brian Morrissey in The Rebooting. That is the "fundamental misalignment" behind the commoditization of publishers, and it collides with a simple supply problem Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc., framed at The Rebooting's TRB Audience Summit: "you need chips, you need power, and you need the information to run through them. Two of these supply chains are well funded... one of them is not funded at all." Morrissey's version is sharper: "Chips and power have supply constraints. Enchilada recipes do not." The one piece of leverage publishers do hold is collective, not individual: USA Today CEO Mike Reed told Morrissey his publication is weighing whether to block Google's combined search indexer and AI scraper entirely once Google-driven revenue drops low enough. But the logic cuts against any lone actor, because if one publisher blocks a model, the AI finds near-identical content elsewhere, so unless publishers cut Google off en masse, its AI keeps treating them as interchangeable. The same roundup runs the story in reverse on the buy side: McDonald's is standing up a billion-dollar media network of its own, and Letterboxd is up for sale at $300 million with The New York Times among the bidders, so the audience layer publishers once owned is being repackaged by brands, banks and platforms.

The crux

AI developers value publisher content as fungible training material rather than expertise, and because the information supply chain is the only one that is not scarce, publishers' only real counter-leverage is collective action (mass blocking) that a single opt-out can never substitute for.

Sell-side read

This is the strategic frame behind every AI-licensing negotiation: publishers are selling a commodity from a position of oversupply, so the value proposition has to be scarcity (archive depth, verified data, brand trust) rather than volume of content. Assume any deal priced on raw text volume will race to the bottom.

Watch

Whether a coordinated publisher block of Google's indexer/scraper materialises, and whether Google's pay-per-value licensing pilot gives publishers a price signal worth accepting instead.