SGGP
The AI craze has created uncertainty about the future of online news, prompting major US newspapers to launch negotiations and force OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to pay for access to their vital resources.
For years, tech companies like OpenAI have been comfortable using news content to build datasets that teach their machines how to recognize and respond fluently to human queries. But as the push to develop advanced AI models heats up, news media and data storage conglomerates are demanding their share of the huge potential market for generative AI, which is expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
 |
| Image illustrating publishers and newspapers that want AI-generated content, like ChatGPT, to pay for it. Photo: THE WASHINGTON POST |
Since August, at least 535 news organizations, such as The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post… have installed a blocker to prevent their content from being collected and used to “train” ChatGPT.
According to The Washington Post, the two sides are currently in discussions focusing on paying publishers to display links to individual news stories, a development that would be aimed at claiming the rights of newspapers.
In July, OpenAI struck a deal to license content from the Associated Press (AP) as data to train its AI models. Current negotiations have touched on that idea as well, but are more focused on surfacing content in ChatGPT’s responses to questions. Other useful data sources are also seeking similar deals with leading AI companies, such as Reddit — the popular social message board. If a deal can’t be reached, Reddit is considering blocking search crawlers from Google and Bing.
While OpenAI was talking to the press, nearly $16 billion in venture capital poured into AI in the first three quarters of 2023, according to analytics firm PitchBook — a reflection of how expensive it is to build the technology. Every component is either extremely expensive or difficult to acquire, from hardware to computing power.
In addition to paying off major news organizations, leading AI companies are facing a slew of copyright lawsuits from book authors, artists, and software developers seeking damages and a share of profits. Media conglomerate IAC, which owns The Daily Beast, has been trying to build a coalition of publishers to win billions of dollars from AI companies through a lawsuit.
The New York Times is also considering a lawsuit against OpenAI. Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance (NMA), a trade group representing more than 2,000 publishers, has organized a weeklong tour of Washington and various state capitals to lobby for copyright protections for publishers.
Photo site Shutterstock, which has a partnership to provide image data to OpenAI, has also launched a Donation Fund to reimburse artists whose work is used to train AI models. The fund is estimated to have paid out more than $4 million in May.
Source
Comment (0)