How AI is changing the news, and what businesses need to know

Artificial intelligence has moved beyond being just a productivity tool — it’s changing the way people find and consume news.

This shift is already reshaping how organizations approach public relations, investor relations and corporate communications, Notified reports.

According to Mary Meeker’s 2025 State of the Internet report, ChatGPT is already handling an estimated 365 billion searches annually — a growth rate more than five times faster than Google in its early years. At the same time, Google’s AI Overviews are taking center stage in search results, often giving users summarized answers before they ever visit a website.

The impact is clear — traditional pathways for discovering news are breaking down, and AI-generated summaries are quickly becoming the first point of contact between companies and their audiences.

The Urgency Behind the Shift

The speed of AI adoption has caught many industries off guard and has begun to overwhelm professionals. According to a recent LinkedIn survey, over half of respondents said AI training feels like a second job.

At the same time, newsrooms continue to shrink, people are turning to AI tools instead of traditional search, and generative platforms are pulling together information from press releases, filings, and media stories into single, summarized narratives.

For businesses, this creates a new reality: investors, customers, journalists and employees often see AI-generated answers before they reach the original source. If that content isn’t clear, consistent, and reliable, a company’s story that circulates could be incomplete — or worse, misleading.

How AI Is Changing the Way News Is Found

This transformation has significant implications for visibility, credibility and influence with three major trends already redefining how news reaches the public:

• AI-driven search is replacing traditional clicks — Instead of scanning dozens of headlines, scrolling through feeds, or visiting multiple outlets, more audiences are turning to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews to get direct, synthesized answers. This “one-stop” model is efficient for readers, but it also means fewer direct visits to websites and less visibility for bylines. As a result, brands and media outlets need to think not only about crafting compelling stories but also about how those stories are structured for AI discovery.
• Original sources are carrying more weight — Press releases, SEC filings, earnings summaries and other primary documents increasingly serve as the backbone of AI-generated answers. For example: Because AI systems pull heavily from authoritative, structured sources, organizations that prioritize accurate, well-formatted and timely releases stand to gain more exposure. This dynamic underscores the growing importance of getting the official record right — the closer your content is to the primary source, the more likely it is to be amplified through AI-driven channels.
• Narratives are merging — In the AI-driven ecosystem, content silos are disappearing. Investor updates, press coverage and thought leadership blogs are no longer consumed in isolation; they are aggregated by machines and presented as one cohesive narrative. For communicators, this blurring of boundaries means that every piece of content, whether intended for shareholders, reporters, or the public, has the potential to shape broad perception. Managing message consistency across formats is no longer optional; it’s essential to ensure an organization’s story is represented accurately when AI delivers it back to the world.

3 AI Tips Business Leaders Need to Know 

Whether it’s shaping brand perception, managing investor confidence, or ensuring accurate media coverage, the way content should be published today will directly affect how it appears in tomorrow’s AI-driven summaries.

To stay ahead, here are three essential practices to prioritize:

1. Make Content Clear and Reliable

AI tools work best with structured information. Press releases, earnings updates and official statements should be easy to read, consistent and free from gaps that could be misinterpreted. If the details aren’t clear, the story AI presents may not be accurate.

2. Keep PR and IR on the Same Page

The line between media coverage and investor communication has all but disappeared. A single inconsistency across channels can create confusion once AI systems pull everything together. Business leaders should ensure their communications teams are working together to deliver one unified narrative.

3. Write for People — and Machines

Today’s audience isn’t just human. Algorithms are scanning content, too, and shaping how information is shared. That means businesses need to publish content that answers questions directly and holds up as a trusted source when AI tools summarize it (think FAQs).

The Strategic Advantage of Adapting Early

While the AI landscape will continue to change, the companies that respond early will have the edge. By making content structured, consistent and ready for both people and algorithms, they’ll reduce the risk of being misunderstood and strengthen trust with investors, customers and the media.

This isn’t just about keeping up with technology. It’s about protecting reputation, ensuring accuracy and making sure your story is the one that gets told.

This story was produced by Notified and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

Warner Bros. Discovery is suing a prominent artificial intelligence image generator for copyright infringement, escalating a high-stakes battle involving the use of movies and TV shows owned by major studios to teach AI systems.

The lawsuit accuses Midjourney, which has millions of registered users, of building its business around the mass theft of content. The company “brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property” by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint, filed on Thursday in California federal court.

“The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners,” said a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson in a statement. “Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.”

For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It’s led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content.

Warner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their movies and TV shows.

In a statement, Disney said it’s “committed to protecting our creators and innovators” and that it’s “pleased to be joined by Warner Bros. Discovery in the fight against Midjourney’s blatant copyright infringement.”

Added NBCUniversal, “Creative artists are the backbone of our industry, and we are committed to protecting their work and our intellectual property.”

In the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery points to Midjourney generating images of iconic copyrighted characters. At the forefront are heroes who’re at the center of DC Studios’ movies and TV shows, like Superman, Wonder Woman and The Joker; others are Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo characters who’ve become ubiquitous household names; more are Cartoon Network characters, including those from Rick and Morty, who’ve emerged as something of cultural touchstones in recent years.

Midjourney, which has four tiers of paid subscriptions ranging from $10 to $120 per month and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, returns characters owned by Warner Bros. Discovery even in response to prompts like “classic comic book superhero battle” that don’t explicitly mention any particular intellectual property, the complaint alleges.

As evidence that Midjourney trained its AI system on its intellectual property, the studio attaches dozens of images showing the tool’s outputs compared to stills from its movies and TV shows. When prompted with “Batman, screencap from The Dark Knight,” the service returns an image of Christian Bale’s portrayal of the character featuring the costume’s Kevlar plate design that differentiated it from previous iterations of the hero that appears to be taken from the movie or promotional materials, with few to no alternations made. One of the more convincing examples highlights a 3D-animated Bugs Bunny mirroring his adaptation in Space Jam: A New Legacy.

The lawsuit argues Midjourney’s ability to return copyrighted characters is a “clear draw for subscribers,” diverting consumers away from purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery-approved posters, wall art and prints, among other products that must now compete against the service.

Like OpenAI, the content used to train Midjourney’s technology is a black box, representing an obstacle for some creators who’ve sued AI companies for copyright infringement. Rightsholders have mined public statements from AI company C-suites for clues. In 2022, Midjourney founder David Holz said in an interview that his employees “grab everything they can, they dump it in a huge file, and they kind of set it on fire to train some huge thing.” The specifics of the training process will be subject to discovery.

Warner Bros. Discovery seeks Midjourney’s profits attributable to the alleged infringement or, alternatively, $150,000 per infringed work, which could leave the AI company on the hook for massive damages.

The thrust of the studios’ lawsuits will likely be decided by one question: Are AI companies covered by fair use, the legal doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works without a license? On that issue, a court found earlier this year that Amazon-backed Anthropic is on solid legal ground, at least with respect to training.

The technology is “among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

Still, the court set the case for trial over allegations that the company illegal downloaded millions of books to create a library that was used for training. Anthropic, which later settled the lawsuit, faced potential damages of hundreds of millions of dollars stemming from the decision that may have laid the groundwork for Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Universal to get similar payouts depending on what they unearth in discovery over how Midjourney obtained copies of thousands of films and TV shosws that were repurposed to teach its image generator.

Still on the sidelines in the fight over generative AI: Paramount Skydance, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple Studios, Sony Pictures and Lionsgate. Some have major AI ambitions.

The Central Alberta First (CAF) partnership has released its final Business Retention, Expansion and Workforce Development (BREWD) and BREWD Community Data Summary Reports ahead of an October conference focused on artificial intelligence in business.

The AI for Business: Tools, Tactics, Transformation Conference is set to take place Oct. 22, 2025 at the Olds College Alumni Centre. It is the first of a series of AI awareness workshops to be implemented under the BREWD regional strategy.

The one-day event will bring together industry leaders, innovators, and technology experts to explore ways how AI can improve businesses.

The BREWD initiative is one of the largest business engagement projects that’s been done in the central Alberta region, which includes over 700 businesses that represent all sectors of the economy.