OpenAI announced deals with Vox Media and The Atlantic on Wednesday, joining a growing number of news organizations that receive money from the artificial intelligence company in exchange for sharing their content.
The deal comes a week after OpenAI announced a similar partnership with News Corp., the Murdoch family-controlled company that owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. Over the past few months, the AI ​​company has inked deals with publishers representing more than 70 newspapers, news sites, and magazines.
As more people use OpenAI's ChatGPT and other chatbots to seek information, AI companies are looking for ways to bring current, useful, and accurate information into their products. AI models still often produce misinformation, so relying on third-party news content is one way to make AI answers more trustworthy.
Meanwhile, news organizations worry that more people will use AI to get their news, drawing traffic and subscribers away from their websites and further damaging businesses already shaken by the rise of social media.
“We believe that search powered by AI models will become one of the fundamental ways people browse the web in the future,” The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson said in a statement on the magazine's website.
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But not everyone in publishing agrees: The deal represents a major divide within the journalism and publishing industries, with some organizations suing OpenAI for using their content to train AI algorithms without compensation, and others selling breaking news content to AI companies to get a cut of growing AI revenues.
Several news organizations, including The New York Times and several newspapers owned by investment fund Alden Global Capital, have sued OpenAI for using their copyrighted works to train its AI algorithms, joining a group of writers, artists and musicians fighting what they see as a wave of massive theft by tech companies.
Other tech companies, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, have scraped large swaths of the web to train the AI ​​models that power their chatbots, without payment or permission. All of the tech companies claim that their training with scraped data is legal under fair use, a concept in copyright law that allows for the reuse of material if it is significantly altered.
But OpenAI also needs access to paid content from news sites to market its chatbot as the latest and most helpful, and these content deals will help it do just that: Soon, when users ask ChatGPT for news updates, they'll see headlines, article sections and links from news sites that have partnered with the company.
Less than a week after the deal was signed, The Atlantic published an opinion piece by Jessica Lessin, a longtime technology journalist and founder of the tech news site The Information, in which she argued that the news organization was ignorant of the deal with OpenAI.
“For as long as I've been reporting on internet companies, I've watched newsreaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google and Meta,” Lessin wrote. “It never works out as planned.”
