Publishers Meet With OpenAI to Discuss Licensing Content

Several news media publishers have reportedly met with OpenAI to discuss licensing their content for use in training that firm’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The publishers meeting with OpenAI included Wall Street Journal owner News Corp., Dotdash Meredith owner IAC, USA Today owner Gannett and industry trade association News/Media Alliance, Seeking Alpha reported Friday (Dec. 29), citing a paywalled article by The New York Times.

OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft, has also met with companies to discuss the issue of using third-party content to train AI models, according to the report.

This news comes two days after The New York Times sued both Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement and saying that the tech companies’ AI tools “free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in journalism.”

“OpenAI quickly became a multibillion-dollar for-profit business built in large part on the unlicensed exploitation of copyrighted works belonging to The Times and others,” the publisher wrote in its complaint.

Reached by PYMNTS on Wednesday (Dec. 27), an OpenAI spokesperson said the firm respects the rights of content creators and owners and is “committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models.”

Microsoft did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Another publisher, Politico owner Axel Springer, took a different tack, announcing on Dec. 13 that it has partnered with OpenAI to allow the use of its content.

In what was said to be a first-of-its-kind deal, this collaboration will provide summaries of Axel Springer content from Politico, Business Insider and Bild in reply to queries asked of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“This initiative will enrich users’ experience with ChatGPT by adding recent and authoritative content on a wide variety of topics and explicitly values the publisher’s role in contributing to OpenAI’s products,” OpenAI said when announcing the partnership.

Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, said in the press release: “We are excited to have shaped this global partnership between Axel Springer and OpenAI — the first of its kind. We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism — to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level.”