Antonio Arcidiacono, EBU Director of Technology & Innovation
The AI revolution poses both opportunities and challenges for European media. However, to take those opportunities and to face those challenges, urgent actions – financial, legislative and practical – are necessary to stimulate and protect the European media ecosystem.
The main trigger for the massive changes we are seeing is linked to the substantial difference between innovation investment in Europe and comparable figures in the US and China, amounting to two orders of magnitude. Google, Microsoft and Meta alone are together investing almost USD 400bn between 2023 and 2025, further boosting their ability to dominate the market.
Financial actions
In Europe the threat can only be averted if we increase investments in large-scale development projects and industry-wide collaboration in media innovation with a medium-to-long-term perspective. There is a precedent for this kind of pre-competitive cooperation on the continent, with projects like GSM and DVB in the 1990s paving the way to the development of cellular phones and digital broadcasting, with a subsequent global impact. Such cooperation needs to go hand-in-hand with continent-wide legislative action to mobilize private investment.
Public money alone will not be enough – we always and predominantly require private funds to efficiently drive development. One key element of this should involve recovering and redirecting a portion of Big Tech revenues to finance European development. This would represent appropriate compensation for the use of European content and for the monetization of European citizens.
Maintaining independence
Urgent action is also required to maintain media independence in Europe. Regulations alone, though necessary, will not be enough to protect us. The emergence of sophisticated AI tools has made it increasingly easy to produce manipulated or fake content that is difficult to detect. The decentralized nature of the internet complicates content-provenance tracking, allowing for easy copying, alteration and redistribution of content without clear origin tracing. These developments undermine the ability of legitimate media, in particular public service media, to maintain trustworthiness, necessitating urgent collaborative actions.
Individual and uncoordinated solutions won’t be sufficient. Dependency on any individual provider creates vulnerabilities in the content supply chain. We can again find a precedent in the 90s, when Europe successfully developed and implemented open standards-based technologies for securely relaying content provenance and authenticity information. Today, again, a proactive effort is urgently required to implement standardized protocols and frameworks, for verifying content across platforms and media types.
For all these reasons, EBU T&I has initiated a collaborative project, Security4Media, to protect media integrity and trust, developing robust, open-source technologies for content authentication and provenance tracking while at the same time improving cybersecurity across the media value chain for all partners. Security4Media is fostering an international partnership between media organizations, both public and private, tech companies and regulatory bodies to create a robust ecosystem for content authenticity, setting new standards for transparency and accountability in media production and distribution.
AI tools seem likely to increasingly mediate access to information, reducing even further the public sphere and acting more as an oracle than as one of many sources enriching citizens’ civic and political awareness. To counter this, and sustain democracy and freedom, a new imperative involves stimulating audiences, through continued education and engagement, to become more discerning consumers of media, actively participating in the verification process, supporting media integrity and trust.
Finally, guaranteeing the sustainability of multiple media sources and their future development requires combining the efforts of the entire media industry. We must facilitate clear and equitable interactions with the Big Tech companies, framing the rules and conditions under which media companies will deal with platform providers, putting an appropriate value on platform training, development of AI models, and content copyright. This necessitates building competence around AI within the media industry.
This article first appeared in the December 2024 issue of tech-i magazine.