Bots are the audience now and that changes everything for media

As bots overtake human visitors, the publishers who win will be the ones who learn to price their content for the machines reading it. When generative AI was new, the issue of how it worked with copyright law was poorly understood. Over the previous two decades it was generally taken as a given that the mass indexing done by search engines like Google was a necessary part of being on the internet. Google wasn’t reproducing the content—just showing users a headline and a link—so it always functioned more like a distributor than a republisher.