OpenAI, Condé Nast and the future of the media

Magazine publishing giant Condé Nast has signed a deal with OpenAI, the latest tie-up between a major media organisation and the artificial intelligence start-up.

The deal will "expand the reach of Condé Nast's content", CEO Roger Lynch told staff. OpenAI said its products, such as ChatGPT, would be able to use content from Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired and other Condé Nast-owned titles, to give "fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources", according to its blog post. 

Publishers are "increasingly" signing deals with AI companies to license the use of their content, said Press Gazette – despite "early doubts" and the high-profile legal action by The New York Times against OpenAI and its main backer, Microsoft. Such deals "commonly include" access to and use of news publishers' content, with a citation "currently promised". But others are more sceptical, and even litigious.

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To sue or to sign

OpenAI "knows that high-quality data matters" in the AI business – and news publishers have "vast amounts of it", said The Guardian. AI labs develop large language models (LLMs), which underpin tools such as ChatGPT, by using "trillions of words" online to train them. This "vital resource" helps LLMs understand text-based prompts and come up with an answer. 

But "ravenous" AI models "always need more data". So as AI labs "grow increasingly hungry for reliable, timely, and above all human-written text", the news industry is "assessing how best to react". 

In January, The Information reported that OpenAI had offered some organisations "as little as between $1 million and $5 million" a year to train its LLMs on their copyrighted articles. "That's a tiny amount even for small publishers."

However, the deal News Corp signed with OpenAI in May is reportedly worth more than $250 million over five years, according to The Wall Street Journal. That gives access to articles from the WSJ, the New York Post and Barron's, among others.

OpenAI has already signed licensing deals with the US news agency The Associated Press, French newspaper Le Monde, El País owner Prisa Media and Germany's Axel Springer, which publishes the Bild tabloid. 

But other news publications and media outlets are "aggressively trying to protect their businesses" from being scraped for AI-generated content, said CNBC. By the end of last year most big publishers, including Reuters, The Guardian and the BBC, were already blocking AI crawlers from scraping their sites, said the Financial Times citing the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The New York Times filed a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming intellectual property violation and copyright infringement. Microsoft and OpenAI are accountable for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages", according to a filing in New York. 

The Center for Investigative Reporting, the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US, announced a similar suit in June. "OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful," said chief executive Monika Bauerlein, "but they never asked for permission or offered compensation."

This "free rider behaviour" violates copyright. If the practice continues, the public's access to the truth will be "limited to AI-generated summaries of a disappearing news landscape".

A deal with the devil?

So what's in it for publishers? When The Atlantic announced a "strategic content and product partnership" with OpenAI in May, chief executive Nicholas Thompson said it would make the reporting "more discoverable" to millions of users. 

In June, search engine start-up Perplexity AI launched a revenue-sharing model for publishers. Outlets such as Fortune, Time, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com joined the search chatbot's "Publishers Program", after weeks of accusing it of plagiarism.

The Financial Times has also agreed to license its content to generative AI start-up Prorata.ai, which says it will share 50% of the advertising revenue with publishers when it launches its chatbot this autumn.

This won't pay journalists' salaries, but it at least "establishes an economic model" that publishers "could promote more widely", said Richard Waters in the FT. This is all "still up for grabs", which gives the industry an "important opening".

Many in the media industry "seem to have learned from their painful experience with online gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook". But do publishers have "any better chance of holding on to their audiences and online revenues than they did before?"

Not if history is anything to go by, said Jessica Lessin, the founder of The Information, in The Atlantic. News firms "strike deals to try and ride out the next digital wave", and make "concessions" to platforms that attempt to "take all of the audience (and trust) that great journalism attracts" – without having to do the "complicated and expensive work" of the journalism. "And it never, ever works as planned."