Can the New York Times Save Journalism From Our AI Overlords?

《纽约时报》能从人工智能巨头手中拯救新闻业吗？

For most companies, spending upwards of $20 million on a single legal fight with an uncertain outcome might mean the boss has some explaining to do. For A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, that explanation is simple: It’s the cost of defending journalism—at the Times and everywhere else. 对于大多数公司而言，在一场结果不确定的法律诉讼上花费超过 2000 万美元，可能意味着老板需要给出一番解释。但对于《纽约时报》发行人 A.G. 苏尔茨伯格（A.G. Sulzberger）来说，这个解释很简单：这是捍卫新闻业的代价——不仅是为了《纽约时报》，也是为了整个行业。

Sulzberger, who took on the publisher role about a decade ago and has been an influential leader in the Times’ much-lauded push into digital innovation, has no shortage of defending to do lately. Nearly three years ago, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies illegally used New York Times journalism to train AI models. That legal case, in which motions are still being filed about discovery requests, is only one front in a broader battle: The Trump administration is waging an ongoing war on press freedoms—most recently with an outrageous attempt to subpoena Times journalists over coverage of the president’s Qatar-gifted jet to be used as Air Force One—while AI companies radically reshape the way people find and consume information online. 苏尔茨伯格在大约十年前担任发行人，一直是《纽约时报》备受赞誉的数字化创新转型中的重要领导者，他最近需要捍卫的事情可不少。近三年前，《纽约时报》起诉 OpenAI 和微软侵犯版权，指控这些公司非法使用《纽约时报》的新闻内容来训练人工智能模型。这起法律案件目前仍处于证据开示请求的动议阶段，但这只是更广泛战役的一条战线：特朗普政府正在对新闻自由发动持续的战争——最近的一次是试图传唤《纽约时报》记者，原因涉及对总统使用卡塔尔赠送的喷气式飞机作为“空军一号”的报道——与此同时，人工智能公司正在从根本上重塑人们在线查找和消费信息的方式。

The Times has arguably never been stronger as a business, having recently surpassed 13 million subscribers, and its newsroom is widely seen among journalists as one of the most stable and well-resourced in the business. Still, Sulzberger believes that journalism itself is facing myriad existential dilemmas—from an administration ready and willing to target reporters, from AI companies whose products depend on the very reporting they risk undermining, and media companies being demolished by the changes they’re unleashing on the open web. 《纽约时报》的商业实力可以说达到了前所未有的高度，最近订阅用户数已突破 1300 万，其新闻编辑室在新闻界被广泛视为最稳定、资源最充足的机构之一。尽管如此，苏尔茨伯格认为新闻业本身正面临着无数生存困境——来自随时准备针对记者的政府，来自那些产品依赖于其所破坏的新闻报道的人工智能公司，以及那些因开放网络变革而遭受重创的媒体公司。

I sat down with Sulzberger in late July at WIRED’s offices. We talked about that Times lawsuit, how and where AI is transforming reporting inside the newsroom, and why he thinks journalists and media executives need to team up—even while they continue to compete fiercely. You can read our entire conversation below, or listen to it here. 7 月下旬，我在《连线》（WIRED）杂志的办公室采访了苏尔茨伯格。我们讨论了那场针对 OpenAI 的诉讼、人工智能如何以及在何处改变新闻编辑室的报道工作，以及为什么他认为记者和媒体高管需要携手合作——即使他们之间依然存在激烈的竞争。您可以阅读下方的完整对话，或点击此处收听。

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. （本次采访为篇幅和清晰度进行了编辑。）

KATIE DRUMMOND: AG, welcome. Thank you for being here. 凯蒂·德拉蒙德（KATIE DRUMMOND）：AG，欢迎。感谢你能来。

A.G. SULZBERGER: It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. A.G. 苏尔茨伯格：很高兴来到这里。谢谢你的邀请。

I want to get into AI, and I will, but I would be a terrible journalist if I didn’t start with news that has recently affected your paper. Specifically, I’m talking about the subpoenas that the Justice Department has issued to several Times journalists about their reporting on the Air Force One jet that was gifted to the Trump administration by Qatar. The Justice Department also issued subpoenas to third-party phone service providers to obtain text messages and phone calls between some of those journalists and their family members. 我想谈谈人工智能，我也会谈到，但如果我不从最近影响你们报社的新闻开始，我就不是一个称职的记者。具体来说，我指的是司法部向几位《纽约时报》记者发出的传票，内容涉及他们关于卡塔尔赠送给特朗普政府的“空军一号”喷气式飞机的报道。司法部还向第三方电话服务提供商发出传票，以获取其中一些记者与其家人之间的短信和通话记录。

Thanks for starting there, because it’s obviously yet another disturbing escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to punish and undermine the free press in this country. First I should say, I have so much admiration for the reporters who have done this work and who are doing it under a different kind of pressure than we have seen in generations. I think that by any objective metric, this is the biggest effort to go after the press that we’ve seen from a White House probably since Woodrow Wilson, so in more than a century. 感谢你从这里开始，因为这显然是特朗普政府试图惩罚和破坏这个国家新闻自由的又一次令人不安的升级。首先我必须说，我非常钦佩那些完成这项工作的记者，他们是在几代人以来从未见过的压力下进行报道的。我认为，从任何客观标准来看，这可能是自伍德罗·威尔逊（Woodrow Wilson）以来，即一个多世纪以来，白宫对新闻界采取的最大规模的打压行动。

These reporters just continued, day after day, to put their heads down, right? Not to get baited by the folks booing them or the folks cheering them on, and just to do their work. That work includes reporting things that the President of the United States doesn’t want the public to know because it may be unflattering or embarrassing. In this case, they reported a story, as you said, on the Qatari-donated jet, and it’s a little unclear: Was it donated to the Trump administration or to Trump himself? A donation worth hundreds of millions of dollars. 这些记者日复一日地埋头苦干，对吧？他们没有被那些喝倒彩的人或欢呼的人所诱导，只是专注于自己的工作。这项工作包括报道美国总统不想让公众知道的事情，因为这些事情可能并不光彩或令人尴尬。在这种情况下，正如你所说，他们报道了关于卡塔尔捐赠喷气式飞机的故事，但有一点不清楚：它是捐赠给了特朗普政府，还是捐赠给了特朗普本人？这是一笔价值数亿美元的捐赠。

Right. When that occurred, a lot of people had questions about whether it could ever be secure enough to hold the President of the United States and ferry him around the world. Sure enough, our reporters found out that on one of its inaugural trips, its first trip overseas to Turkey, there were concerns that it was insufficiently equipped to respond to a threat, that the president had to fly back on the original Air Force One. He denied this initially. But we exposed the truth, which has subsequently been confirmed. 没错。当这件事发生时，许多人质疑它是否足够安全，能够搭载美国总统并带他环游世界。果不其然，我们的记者发现，在它的一次首航中，即第一次前往土耳其的海外旅行中，有人担心它应对威胁的装备不足，总统不得不乘坐原来的“空军一号”飞回。他最初否认了这一点。但我们揭露了真相，随后这一真相也得到了证实。

Then it gets even stranger. Every administration, we will publish something that the President of the United States doesn’t want the American people to know. Upsetting a president of either party is nothing new to us. What is new is that the administration defied many of its own standards and practices and explicit guidelines to very rapidly, in the course of a day or two, serve subpoenas on these reporters. They went straight to the homes of reporters, in an obvious attempt to intimidate them. As you said, we are now learning that they sought to get records, not just from the reporters themselves, but from members of their families. It’s a gross overreach. 事情变得更加离奇了。在每一届政府任期内，我们都会发布一些美国总统不想让美国人民知道的事情。让任何党派的总统感到不安对我们来说并不新鲜。新鲜的是，本届政府无视其自身的许多标准、惯例和明确准则，在短短一两天内就迅速向这些记者发出了传票。他们直接去了记者的家中，显然是想恐吓他们。正如你所说，我们现在了解到，他们不仅试图从记者本人那里获取记录，还试图从他们的家人那里获取记录。这是一种严重的越权行为。

Just to contextualize for listeners, how unusual is all of that? To have law enforcement at your home as a journalist, to be subpoenaed right out of the gate, to have those phone records called up by the Justice Department. How weird is that? 为了让听众了解背景，这一切有多不寻常？作为一名记者，执法人员出现在你家门口，一上来就被传唤，电话记录被司法部调取。这有多离谱？

I mean, it’s extremely unusual. It’s very rare. The closest comparison that I have had at the Times in my tenure—I’ve been in this job roughly a decade—happened in the first Trump administration, when some of our reporter records were secretly seized by the Justice Department. In fact, that led to some reforms in the Justice Department aimed at curtailing that type of abuse. On one side this is objectively very rare—there was similar overreach, you may remember, in a Washington Post case some months ago, where they actually raided the reporter’s home and seized her devices—[but] on the other [hand], this is building naturally off of what I think is a broader effort. 我的意思是，这极其不寻常。这非常罕见。在我任职期间——我担任这个职位大约十年了——在《纽约时报》经历过的最接近的比较发生在特朗普第一届政府时期，当时我们一些记者的记录被司法部秘密扣押。事实上，这促使司法部进行了一些旨在遏制此类滥用权力的改革。一方面，这在客观上非常罕见——你可能还记得几个月前《华盛顿邮报》的一起案件中也出现了类似的越权行为，他们实际上突袭了记者的家并扣押了她的设备——但另一方面，这自然是基于我认为更广泛的打压行动。

You have also criticized other media outlets for capitulating to the administration, particul… 你还批评了其他媒体机构向政府屈服，特别是……