Right now, AI and the journalism industry seem to mix like oil and water (oil and fire, actually). There’s ongoing tension between publications and the AI companies scraping their data, but there might be a silver lining to this scenario. According to a new report, OpenAI and News Corp just announced a new multi-year deal. This deal will give OpenAI access to News Corp’s news.
In case you don’t know, News Corp is a major company that owns several journalistic publications including The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Australian, The New York Post, The Wallstreet Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, The Advertiser, Herald Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, the Courier Mail, and Investor’s Business Daily.
It’s a major corporation, having earned $2.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year. So, it definitely has some major sway over the news industry.
News Corp struck a multi-year deal with OpenAI
One of the major issues with AI companies using news stories is that they’re usually using the information without the publications’ consent. This is something that led to the massive lawsuit that the New York Times has filed against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Well, in order to side-step any more legal issues, OpenAI and News Corp shook hands on a multi-year deal that will total $250 million over the next five years. So, it’s $5 million each year. This deal will give ChatGPT access to news from the publications that New Corp owns.
This isn’t the only partnership that OpenAI has announced. The company also partnered with Reddit, Dotdash Meredith, The Financial Times, Axel Springer, The Associated Press, Bild, and Die Welt. The last two are German companies. OpenAI also partnered with Spanish publication Prisma Media.
Are these deals worth it?
That remains to be seen. One issue is that AI companies are able to scrape data from publications and reproduce that data in AI-generated results. This lets the reader forgo going to the website and contributing to that site’s ad revenue.
One major factor driving a stake into the journalism industry’s heart is Google’s AI Overviews. When you do a search, you’ll see AI-generated overviews of what you looked up, and this has had a massive impact on several sites.
However, it looks like these deals will send money directly to the companies that OpenAI’s getting data from. We have to keep in mind that these deals are sending money to the parent companies of these sites, so we don’t know how much money the individual publications are getting.
In any case, it’s a lot better than taking data for free. Now, we just need Google to do the same!
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