OpenAI is on a campaign to win over the news industry.
The ChatGPT maker announced this week it had struck partnerships with two major European media organizations: France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media.
That means in the coming months users can engage with content from these outlets through summaries of news articles and “enhanced links” to original articles on ChatGPT, according to OpenAI. OpenAI will also be able to use their content to train their models.
OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, said the partnerships will “enable ChatGPT users around the world to connect with the news in new ways that are interactive and insightful.”
The partnerships are the latest in a series of agreements OpenAI has struck with news outlets. In December, OpenAI and Axel Springer announced a multi-year content licensing deal that will allow ChatGPT to summarize and answer user queries with select content from Axel Springer publications like Politico, Business Insider, and European properties like BILD and WELT. OpenAI has also been in talks with CNN, Fox Corp. and Time about similar deals, Bloomberg reported.
The question of how AI will impact the news industry — beset by layoffs and shrinking digital advertising revenue — has loomed large since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Some media executives have expressed concern that AI chatbots undermine journalists’ work and threaten the industry’s future.
Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, which owns publications like the New Yorker, Wired, and GQ, said that generative AI tools have been built with “stolen goods” during a congressional hearing in January.
“The amount of time it would take to litigate, appeal, go back to the courts appeal, maybe ultimately make it to the Supreme Court to settle between now and then there’ll be many, many media companies that would go out of business,” he said. Even before the hearing, though, Condé Nast may have discussed licensing its content to Apple as it develops its AI systems, according to The New York Times.
The Times, meanwhile, sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December, alleging that the companies unlawfully used the Times’ content to create competing products.
This is a “threat” to Google
Publishers who’ve signed agreements with OpenAI say they hope the partnerships will bring new life to their business.
“These discussions with AI players, punctuated by this first signature, are born of our belief that, faced with the scale of the transformations that lie ahead, we need, more than ever, to remain mobile to avoid the perils that are taking shape and seize the opportunities for development,” Le Monde said in a post about the partnership.
“The dangers have already been widely identified: the plundering or counterfeiting of our content, the industrial and immediate fabrication of false information that flouts all journalistic rules, the re-routing of our audiences towards platforms likely to provide undocumented answers to every question. Simply put, the end of our uniqueness and the disappearance of an economic model based on revenues from paid distribution.”
These dangers global news organizations have been facing for years. The rise of Google Search has siphoned ad dollars away from news organizations by distributing portions of its content in its search engines.
As a result, media outlets have unwillingly relied on search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook to distribute their content.
Media experts now think that ChatGPT could be a better alternative, threatening Google while offering a financial incentive to news organizations to collaborate with it.
“You couldn’t search Facebook for news really. They just show you ads and articles that people shared,” said Tauhid Zaman, a professor at Yale School of Management who studies the influence of AI on social media and social networks.
ChatGPT serves content in a “nice cleaned up format,” he said, adding that the format is something even search engines like Google can’t match because they cannot “access the content, they don’t have the subscription to take the article and summarize it.”
By wooing users with a better interface, OpenAI could threaten Google’s dominance over online search, Zaman said. Meanwhile, for news organizations, partnering with OpenAI might be the only path to survival.
“Publishers have good reason to be skeptical about signing these agreements, but I don’t think they have a choice,” Hugh Martin, an emeritus professor of the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, told Business Insider by email.
He added that the industry’s ongoing efforts to fight OpenAI are an uphill battle that may be futile in the long run. “All this is defensive, OpenAI has the upper hand, and I think the changes it will bring are just beginning.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
