Kerry Stokes spurns doing a Rupert, rides again
We’ve all been chewing over Rupert Murdoch’s retirement announcement two weeks ago, watching on as business figures laud the 92-year-old for stepping back while at the top – or at least near the top. Even fellow media mogul Kerry Stokes gave us quotes saying Rupert was “one of Australia’s great business success stories”.
Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes is back for more.
While Stokes has also had a tough couple of years – with the Ben Roberts-Smith mess still haunting him, the Perth billionaire doesn’t appear to be taking cues from his nonagenarian one-time sparring partner.
Late on Friday afternoon, Seven West Media released its proxy form for its November AGM, which revealed Stokes was renominating to become a director for another three years or so.
He has been chairman of SWM, the ASX-listed parent company of Channel Seven and The West Australian, since 2008. His son, Ryan, was re-elected as director last year.
But at 83, Stokes must believe he’s got more to give to the Australian media.
The beast: AI is all the rage, and all the rage is directed at AI companies scraping news websites to build their large language models such as ChatGPT – for free. News Corp has consistently made the case that it should be paid for its “proprietary” content, and is in talks with AI firms.
On August 25, The Guardian reported that major news outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Reuters and the ABC had blocked OpenAI’s access to their work. It’s easy to check: just add “robots.txt” to the end of any URL. (News organisations owned by News Corp Australia and Nine, including the Financial Review, haven’t blocked the crawler.)
So why did Australia’s public broadcaster block the ChatGPT bot? A freedom of information request
Read more on afr.com
