In recent weeks, the world of platforms and publishers has been stirred up by licensing deals and litigation. News Corp, the Financial Times, and Dotdash Meredith have struck licensing deals with OpenAI, while Axel Springer and Informa have teamed up with Microsoft.
Under the terms of the Financial Times deal, OpenAI will gain access to content from both sides of the FT’s paywall to train its generative AI technology. Once trained, OpenAI’s flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, will be able to answer questions with summaries from FT journalism and provide links back to the original source.
However, not all news has been positive. Eight newspapers owned by subsidiaries of Alden Global Capital, including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and Denver Post, are suing OpenAI and Microsoft. They allege that the tech firms infringed their copyright when training their respective generative AI products, ChatGPT and Copilot. The lawsuit also accuses the tech firms of unauthorized use of the newspapers’ trademarks, removing copyright management information, and causing reputational damage by attributing “hallucinated” answers to the newspapers’ reporting.
The big question for news organizations is whether to strike a deal or not. For those not invited to the table, it’s more a case of dealing with it.
OpenAI’s licensing deal with the FT was the fifth such arrangement it has struck since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022. The first came last July when it reached an agreement with the Associated Press. Since then similar deals have been done with Axel Springer, Le Monde, and Prisa Media.
But licensing deals are not the only way tech firms have forged financial relationships with the journalism world. The current moment contains echoes of the recent past when news organizations were deciding whether to accept offers to be paid launch partners on new products like Facebook Live and Instant Articles. Then, the question has become whether to take money, credits, or training sessions offered as part of big-money journalism initiatives like Google’s Digital News Initiative and the Facebook Journalism Project.
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