The Financial Times, a publication read by top financial executives with a $75 per month price tag for complete online access, is letting OpenAI use its articles to train an AI chatbot.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT will soon answer relevant questions with a summary and quotes drawn straight from the pages of the FT, per a deal announced Monday. The chatbot will link back to the full FT articles it references.
FT Group CEO John Ridding said that “it’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material” and that OpenAI “understands the importance of transparency, attribution, and compensation – all essential for us.”
The financial details of the partnership, as well as when the FT articles will be incorporated into OpenAI’s products, were not disclosed.
John Ridding, CEO, Financial Times. Photo by Sportsfile/Corbis/Sportsfile via Getty Images
In addition to FT, OpenAI inked a similar deal with Axel Springer, the publisher behind Politico, Business Insider, and Bild, in December, which means ChatGPT could be citing the company’s content soon.
According to the deal, ChatGPT will summarize articles from Axel Springer’s brands as they are published in real-time and link to the full articles, potentially driving more traffic to the publisher’s sites.
Related: Authors Are Suing OpenAI Because ChatGPT Is Too ‘Accurate’ — Here’s What That Means
Newspaper Publishers Are Suing OpenAI
While FT and Axel Springer are examples of two organizations that chose to work with OpenAI, other publications are taking legal action against the ChatGPT-maker claiming copyright infringement.
Eight newspapers owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Tuesday.
The publications alleged that both ChatGPT and Copilot, the AI chatbots offered by OpenAI and Microsoft respectively, could replicate long excerpts of articles behind paywalls with the right prompt.
This could indicate that the chatbots were trained on copyrighted articles used without permission or payment.
Microsoft and OpenAI “are taking the publishers’ work with impunity and are using the publishers’ journalism to create GenAI products that undermine the publishers’ core businesses by retransmitting “their content”—in some cases verbatim from the publishers’ paywalled websites— to their readers,” the complaint stated.
The AI bots could also hallucinate, or churn out incorrect information, and attribute that information to publications, per the complaint.
Other news organizations have leveled similar claims against OpenAI and Microsoft in earlier legal actions. The New York Times filed a lawsuit in December alleging that the two tech giants used millions of its articles “to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”
News sites The Intercept, AlterNet, and Raw Story filed their own lawsuits in February.
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