OpenAI has entered into an agreement with Condé Nast and its prestigious publication portfolio, including Vogue, The New Yorker and Wired.
It integrates news and other texts published by Condé Nast into OpenAI's AI products, comparable to ChatGPT and the newly introduced SearchGPT.
The deal, announced on Tuesday, August 20, 2024, marks one other milestone in OpenAI's technique to secure high-quality content for its AI models.
Financial details weren’t disclosed, but given the standard of the content offered (which can soon be available in the shape of information), the deal is prone to be a major transaction.
Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of OpenAI, was quick to comment on the corporate's commitment to maintaining the standard and integrity of Condé Nast's material.
“We are committed to working with Condé Nast and other news publishers to be sure that accuracy, integrity and respect for high-quality reporting are maintained whilst AI plays a bigger role in news discovery and distribution,” Lightcap said.
Motivated by huge sums of cash and the fear that generative AI tools will spell the top of publishing, Condé Nast is joining a growing list of corporations proactive collaboration with OpenAI and others. These include Time Magazine, the Financial Times and Axel Springer.
Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, has directly acknowledged this challenge: “Our partnership with OpenAI begins to offset a few of these revenues in order that we are able to proceed to guard and spend money on our journalism and artistic endeavors.”
This deal seems to contradict Wired's technology-skeptical philosophy.
Wired, known for its often critical coverage of the tech industry and its investigations into scandals and controversies within the tech industry, is now partnering with the very company at the middle of a few of its criticisms.
The irony is that a publication that recently described the AI search tool Perlpexity as “Bull**** machine“ will now pump its content into SearchGPT, OpenAI’s Perplexity competitor.
In addition, as recently as June 2023, news executives and legal experts from The New York Times, Vox Media, News Corp, Condé Nast and IAC discussed joining forces to combat the unauthorized use of their news content for AI purposes.
All this shows how fragile the protective partitions of the publishing media are when AI corporations put pressure on them to reveal their data in return for big payments.
Some media corporations still resist change
Not all media corporations were keen to partner with AI corporations.
The New York Times and eight other newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI and Microsoft claim that that is copyright infringement and are demanding billions in damages.
Anthropic was just today the victim of a Lawsuit by three authors They claim that that is book copyright infringement, highlighting the widening divide between publishers and AI corporations.
In the top, this might develop into a case of “when you can’t beat them, join them.”
Not way back, the three major record labels Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Records Lawsuit filed as a result of earthquake risk against AI corporations for allegedly stealing copyrighted music.
However, additionally they expressed their willingness to cooperate if the AI corporations would admit their copyright violations and work towards mutually helpful solutions.
This “data race” is changing the connection between technology corporations and content creators.
While some see these partnerships as a approach to monetize content within the age of artificial intelligence, others worry in regards to the long-term consequences for journalism and mental property rights.
It is difficult to say whether publishers like Condé Nast are acting rapidly.
We may have to attend and see what impact SearchGPT and the following generations of generative AI tools may have on the web and the best way we search and devour information.
