OpenAI announces partnerships with Le Monde and Prisa Media to integrate news content into ChatGPT. What happens to publishers that do not have a license agreement with OpenAI?
OpenAI has announced partnerships with the international news organizations Le Monde and Prisa Media. The intention is to integrate the content of these publishers into ChatGPT.
According to OpenAI, the partnerships will allow ChatGPT users to access current and relevant news content from Le Monde and Prisa Media through selected summaries with references and links to the original articles.
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap sees the licensing as supporting journalism and "enhancing opportunities for content creators."
"In partnership with Le Monde and Prisa Media, our goal is to enable ChatGPT users around the world to connect with the news in new ways that are interactive and insightful," Lightcap said.
Selected publishers sign Big AI deals
The partnerships with Le Monde and Prisa Media follow similar deals with Axel Springer, the American Journalism Project and the Associated Press.
Google and Apple are also reportedly pursuing similar deals, which typically include the licensing of training data in addition to news distribution.
These deals might be financially lucrative for the publishers involved. But they also raise a fundamental question about the future of the industry: If chatbots or language-driven interfaces, rather than websites, really are the future of the Internet, what does that mean for publishers who don't have a licensing agreement with OpenAI and the like?
The influence of the leading chatbot companies on the media landscape, and thus on the way society is informed, would be many times greater through licensing agreements than the already massive influence of Google today.
Access would be even more limited and coexistence would be almost impossible. If you can't make a deal with OpenAI and the like, you're out. Big AI creates the next prisoner's dilemma.
The dilemma is that the best collective outcome for all publishers may be to resist licensing their content and keep the value within their platforms. But the fear of being shut out could drive them to license their content, possibly to their disadvantage. OpenAI could continually lower licensing prices because it has more than enough content. The first flagship deals would start this downward spiral for publishers.
The pockets of big tech companies are deep, but they will have little interest in doing financially relevant business with most or even all publishers. Moreover, the selection criteria for OpenAI-approved publishers are completely unknown. In addition to content, financial terms will certainly play a role. This is a poor criterion for selecting content partners, as OpenAI's much-criticized Springer deal shows.
