OpenAI and News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, Market observation, The sun, and more than a dozen other publishing brands, have entered into a multi-year deal to display news from those publications in ChatGPT, News Corp announced on Wednesday. OpenAI will be able to access both current and archived content from News Corp’s publications and use the data to further train its AI models. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal, but a report in The Wall Street Journal estimated that News Corp would receive $250 million in cash and loans over five years.
“The pact recognises that there is a price to pay for premium journalism,” News Corp chief Robert Thomson said in a memo to staff on Wednesday. “The digital age has been characterised by the dominance of distributors, often at the expense of creators, and many media companies have been swept along by a relentless technological tide. Now it is up to us to make the most of this divine opportunity.”
Generative AI has exploded in popularity since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. However, the quality of responses from AI-powered chatbots is only as good as the data used to train the models that power them. Until now, AI companies have trained their models by scraping publicly available data from the internet, often without the consent of developers. But more recently, they have entered into financial agreements with the news industry to ensure that AI models can be trained with current and authoritative information. In the last few months alone, OpenAI has announced partnerships with Reddit, the Financial Times, Dotdash MeredithThe Associated PressGerman publisher Axel Springer, which is the owner Politico And Business Insider in the USA and Picture And The world in Germany and Spain Medium rushLast month, News Corp also struck a deal with Google, reportedly worth between $5 million and $6 million, to train its AI models, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph. The information.
Google and OpenAI are not the only companies making these agreements to train their AI models. Hours before News Corp’s announcement Business Insider reported that Meta, which recently integrated its own AI chatbot into Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram and also sells AI-powered sunglasses, is considering striking its own deals with news publishers to gain access to training data.
Money from AI companies is increasingly a growing source of revenue for a struggling news industry. However, some publishers are still reluctant to make such deals. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over their use of content to train AI systems. And that NOWThe BBC And The edge have blocked OpenAI from scraping their websites.