A brand competing with a version of itself it never approved

I read something mildly unsettling over the weekend.

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, stating they generated fabricated stories and attributed them to those newsrooms - as if the papers had actually published them.

I've seen a lot of "AI used our content for free" stories recently. This one is different. It's about creating an environment where readers believe an outlet said something it never said, which I find genuinely problematic.

The complaint calls generative AI "a snake eating its own tail", arguing it could destroy the very organisations it depends on for source material. Referral traffic to midsize publishers was down 47% year on year by last December, according to the industry data cited in the filing.

Here's what worries me most. A lot of people are starting to really trust LLMs, because they're getting better and better at doing what people want. But once a trusted AI can put a brand's name on words that brand never wrote, the brand isn't competing with cheaper content anymore. It's competing with a version of itself it never approved - and that distorts the whole concept of what trust is about.

Does the media industry now need a team of people whose job is checking what's being said under their own byline, across LLMs?