The Financial Times, a publication read by top financial executives that costs $75 a month for full online access, is letting OpenAI use its articles to train an AI chatbot.
According to a deal announced on Monday, OpenAI’s ChatGPT will soon answer relevant questions with a summary and quotes taken directly from the FT’s pages. The chatbot links back to the full FT articles it links to.
John Ridding, CEO of FT Group, said: “It is of course true that AI platforms pay publishers to use their material” and that OpenAI “understands the importance of transparency, attribution and remuneration – all essential to us.”
The financial details of the partnership, as well as when the FT articles will be integrated into OpenAI’s products, were not disclosed.
John Ridding, CEO, Financial Times. Photo by Sportsfile/Corbis/Sportsfile via Getty Images
In addition to FT, OpenAI signed a similar deal in December with Axel Springer, publisher of Politico, Business Insider and Bild, meaning ChatGPT could soon cite the company’s content.
Under the agreement, ChatGPT will summarize articles from Axel Springer’s brands as they are published in real time and link to the full articles, potentially driving more traffic to the publisher’s websites.
Related: Authors sue OpenAI because ChatGPT is too “accurate” – here’s what this means
Newspaper publishers are suing OpenAI
While FT and Axel Springer are examples of two organizations that have chosen to work with OpenAI, other publications are taking legal action against the ChatGPT maker, claiming copyright infringement.
Eight newspapers owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital, including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Tuesday.
The publications claimed that both ChatGPT and Copilot, the AI chatbots offered by OpenAI and Microsoft respectively, could reproduce long excerpts of articles behind paywalls with the right prompt.
This could indicate that the chatbots were trained to use copyrighted articles without permission or payment.
Related: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for “copyright infringement” and using their works to train AI models
Microsoft and OpenAI “take the work of publishers with impunity and use publishers’ journalism to develop GenAI products that undermine publishers’ core business by “snapping their content” – in some cases literally from publishers’ paywalled websites – pass it on to your readers,” the complaint states.
The AI bots could also hallucinate or produce false information and attribute that information to publications, according to the complaint.
Other news organizations have made similar claims against OpenAI and Microsoft in previous legal actions. The New York Times filed a lawsuit in December alleging that the two tech giants used millions of its articles “to create products that replace the Times and take away its audience.”
News sites The Intercept, AlterNet and Raw Story filed their own lawsuits in February.
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