Financial Times becomes latest media outlet to enter into partnership with OpenAI
The British newspaper has joined a list of news organisations entering into a content licensing agreement with OpenAI.
The Financial Times is the latest media company to sign a deal with the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI.
The British newspaper announced on Monday “a strategic partnership and licensing agreement” with the maker of ChatGPT.
They said it would allow the AI chatbot users to see information from the FT with attribution. It added that employees of the newspaper already have access to the technology.
Other media organisations such as the Associated Press and Axel Springer, which owns Bild and Politico, struck licensing deals with OpenAI last year.
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The AI company, which released ChatGPT in November 2022 has faced criticism over its use of unlicensed content scrapped from the internet to train the AI chatbot.
The New York Times, notably, sued OpenAI and investor Microsoft for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” for using its articles to train the chatbot.
The US newspaper argued that OpenAI’s chatbots can regurgitate New York Times articles verbatim and mimic their style. It argued that the products compete with content from the newspaper and “usurp commercial opportunities”.
Authors and artists have also sued over their work being used to train machine learning models.
Committed to ‘human journalism’
AI models such as ChatGPT rely on being fed vast amounts of data to learn to summarise and generate new text in response to a user.
OpenAI previously argued in written evidence submitted to the UK House of Lords that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials”.
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The AI company also said in response to the New York Times lawsuit that “regurgitation” was a rare bug that the company was working to fix and that they now provide an “opt-out” process for publishers that do not want the tool accessing their websites.
FT Group CEO John Ridding said in a statement on Monday that the British newspaper is committed to “human journalism”, with the OpenAI partnership broadening “the reach of that work”.
“It’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material. OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution, and compensation – all essential for us. At the same time, it’s clearly in the interests of users that these products contain reliable sources,” Ridding said.
