Euroviews. Publishers are signing big-ticket deals with OpenAI, but at what cost?

In recent months, ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been showering the world’s largest news media companies with lucrative partnership agreements. The exact amount the company has spent padding the pockets of publishers is unknown but may well be in the billions.

News Corp., for example, which owns the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Sunday Times, inked a deal with OpenAI last month that is reported to be worth $250 million (€233.3m).

The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Associated Press, Dotdash Meredith — which owns People Magazine and Investopedia — and Axel Springer, which owns Business Insider and Politico, have all struck deals with the Microsoft-backed AI giant, too.

So what exactly is OpenAI buying? Well, it turns out that publications, especially their online archives, are great for training AI.

While much of this content can be obtained for free using a web crawler, that legally grey manoeuvre has so far exposed OpenAI to lawsuits.

These deals, therefore, could get the company out of a legal bind and be a bulwark against further copyright issues down the road.

Additionally, some of the deals permit OpenAI to feature news content in ChatGPT responses. That is likely meant to support a new “search” feature the company is working on, which, according to Bloomberg, would enable ChatGPT to search the web and cite sources when responding to a user’s prompt.

Great, you might say, OpenAI gets some fodder for its models, and the media receives a much-needed cash injection.

But news media companies have been burned by Big Tech before. And now they’re getting in bed with what could become the biggest, most disruptive tech company maybe ever, without knowing the wider impact AI could have on their businesses.

Consider the