Artificial intelligence companies have already trained their systems on vast amounts of journalism. That leaves a question news organizations are still struggling to answer: If AI depends on news reporting, who should pay for it now and in the future, as models require up-to-date information to remain useful? Lawsuits such as the one filed by The New York Times against OpenAI may take years to resolve. In the meantime, publishers like Axel Springer and News Corp are striking individual content-sharing deals with AI companies — arrangements that help some outlets but may do little for the broader news ecosystem. There were once hopes that laws like Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code — which required Google and Meta to pay for news they distributed and profited from — could expand and be updated to include AI firms’ use of news content. Instead, Google and Meta fought back and have managed to weaken or block similar laws all over the world.…