A Devil’s Bargain With OpenAI Publishers including The Atlantic are signing deals with the AI giant. Where does this lead? By Damon Beres
May 2024
Earlier today, The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, announced in an internal email that the company has entered into a business partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (The news was made public via a press release shortly thereafter.) Editorial content from this publication will soon be directly referenced in response to queries in OpenAI products. In practice, this means that users of ChatGPT, say, might type in a question and receive an answer that briefly quotes an Atlantic story; according to Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s senior vice president of communications, it will be accompanied by a citation and a link to the original source. Other companies, such as Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and Politico, have made similar arrangements.
It does all feel a bit like publishers are making a deal with—well, can I say it? The red guy with a pointy tail and two horns?
A growing number of media companies—the publishers of The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, New York, Politico, The Atlantic, and many others—have signed licensing deals with OpenAI that will formally allow the start-up’s AI models to incorporate recent partner articles into their responses. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI last month.) OpenAI is just the beginning, and such deals may soon be standard for major media companies: Perplexity, which runs a popular AI-powered search engine, has had conversations with various publishers (including The Atlantic’s business division) about a potential ad-revenue-sharing arrangement, the start-up’s chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, told me yesterday. Perplexity has spent the past few weeks defending itself against accusations that it appears to have plagiarized journalists’ work. (A spokesperson for The Atlantic said that its business leadership has been talking with “a number of AI companies” both to explore possible partnerships and to express “significant concerns.”)
OpenAI is paying its partners and receives permission to train its models on their content in exchange.
Generative AI Can’t Cite Its Sources How will OpenAI keep its promise to media companies? By Matteo Wong
June 2024