As the race to license content heats up, OpenAI has announced a new publishing agreement
UK-based daily newspaper the Financial Times (FT) and artificial intelligence (AI) research company OpenAI have announced a new “strategic partnership”.
The deal, announced on April 29, will see the companies use AI to develop new products and features for FT readers.
Under the partnership, users of OpenAI's popular ChatGPT AI chatbot will have access to summaries, quotes and links to FT articles.
The integration was done in hopes of increasing the chatbot's access to real-time, reliable data – a topic that has been hotly debated in the AI and media space.
The Open was hit with a privacy complaint on April 29 after an environmental advocacy group in Austria argued that its chatbot was providing inaccurate information and could violate EU data laws.
The FT said earlier this year that it had become a customer of the enterprise version of ChatGPT, where all its employees would experience “creativity and productivity gains”.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly actively pushing ChatGPT's enterprise offerings to Fortune 500 companies.
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FT Group chief executive John Reedin called it an “important” deal in several ways, including being at the forefront of “how people access and use information”.
“Of course it's right for AI platforms to pay publishers for the use of their content. […] It is clear to consumers that these products are sourced from reliable sources.
This is one of several recent media-related partnerships that OpenAI has launched in the past six months. In March, the AI developer partnered with French publisher Le Monde and Spanish Presa Media to provide French and Spanish news content to ChatGPT.
In the year In December 2023, OpenAI announced a partnership with German media giant Axel Springer. As early as 2024, it said it is in talks with major media companies in the US to license news content, including CNN. Fox and Time.
While the company has successfully worked with major media organizations around the world, it has also faced lawsuits from media outlets.
In December 2023, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it engaged in the unauthorized use of millions of NYT articles to train its chatbots.
The lawsuit is still open, although both parties have moved to dismiss the other's claims.
However, OpenAI's recent activities, including a partnership with the American Journalism Project to support local news initiatives as well as a partnership with the Associated Press, indicate the company's desire to gain a proper license in the media sphere.
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