Collaboration or Litigation: Surge of AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT
On May 23rd, The Wall Street Journal owner News Corp announced a multi-year content-licensing partnership with famed generative artificial-intelligence company OpenAI (The Wall Street Journal, May 23). Presented as one of the biggest deals reached to date between a news publisher and a tech giant, the pact is aimed at ensuring that News Corp publications including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch are compensated for the use of their intellectual property.
Global Recognition and Responses
The announcement of this agreement quickly gathered the attention of leading news outlets across the globe. Like most industry peers, The Washington Post highlighted the unprecedented financial value of the agreement, which could be worth more than $250 million over the next five years (The Washington Post, May 23). Business news television channel CNBC noted that OpenAI would be able to leverage the journalistic content from News Corp’s outlets to improve its flagship chatbot ChatGPT (CNBC, May 22).
Litigation and Industry Concerns
The fear that OpenAI and other AI companies might illicitly extract intellectual property to train models or build news aggregators has led to different strategies on how to approach the relationship with them. In this respect, The New York Times has been leading the battlefront since December 2023, when the historic daily newspaper opened a lawsuit against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for copyright infringement (The New York Times, December 28).
Global Response and Collaborations
Aware that digital articles and stories have become an essential source to train AI models, many other news organizations have opted for a more collaborative approach. The flurry of partnerships was initiated with the agreement between Associated Press (AP) and OpenAI in July last year, which gave the ChatGPT maker access to the AP news archive (Reuters, July 13).
In conclusion, the surge of AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT has sparked both collaborations and litigations within the news publishing industry. As technology continues to advance, finding the balance between innovation and protection of intellectual property remains a key challenge for all stakeholders involved.
