World-changing Agreements Between AI and Media Giants Will Transform News Forever!

The world’s largest tech companies are in talks with major media outlets to strike historic deals on using news content to train artificial intelligence technology.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Adobe have met with news executives in recent months to discuss copyright issues around theirs TO THE products like text chatbots and image generators, according to several people familiar with the talks.

These people said that publishers including News Corp, Axel Springer, The New York Times and The Guardian have each had discussions with at least one of the tech companies.

Those involved in the discussions, which remain in the initial stages, added that the deals could involve average organizations that are paid a subscription-style fee for their content in order to develop the technology behind chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

The talks come as media groups express concern about the threat to the industry posed by the rise of artificial intelligence, as well as fears over OpenAI and Google’s use of their content with no deals in place. Some companies like Stability AI and OpenAI are facing lawsuits from artists, photo agencies and programmers, alleging copyright and contract infringement.

Speaking at INMA’s press conference in May, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson summed up the industry’s outrage, saying:[media’s] Collective intellectual property is under threat and for which we should clamor for redress.”

He added that the AI ​​was “designed so that the reader never visits a journalism website, thus fatally undermining that journalism.”

An agreement would set the pattern for news organizations in their dealings with AI companies around the world.

“Copyright is a crucial issue for all publishers,” said the Financial Times, which is also debating the issue. “As a subscription company, we must protect the value of our journalism and our business model. Engaging in a constructive dialogue with interested companies, as we do, is the best way to achieve this goal”.

Media industry executives want to avoid the mistakes of the early internet age, when many offered articles online for free that ultimately undermined their business models. Big Tech groups like Google and Facebook then accessed that information to help build multibillion-dollar online advertising businesses.

As the popularity of generative AI has grown, so have concerns from the news industry, given the technology’s ability to produce convincing swathes of human-like text.

Google recently announced a generative search feature, which returns an information box written by artificial intelligence on top of its traditional format of web links. It was launched in the US and is preparing for worldwide release.

Some discussions currently involve trying to find a pricing model for news content used as training data for AI models. One number that had been mooted by publishers is $5 million – $20 million a year, according to an industry executive.

Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Politico, which owns Axel Springer, who met with leading AI firms Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, said his first choice would be to create a “quantitative” model similar to the one developed by the music industry that sees radio stations, nightclubs and streaming services pay record labels every time a track is played. This would first require AI companies to disclose their media usage, which they currently aren’t doing.

Döpfner, whose Berlin-based media company also owns German tabloid Bild and Die Welt newspaper, said an annual deal for unlimited use of a media company’s content would be a “second best option,” because that model would be more difficult for small regions or local news outlets to exploit.

“We need an industry-wide solution,” Döpfner said. “We have to work together on this.”

Google has been negotiating with UK news outlets, meeting with the Guardian and NewsUK. The Alphabet-owned company has long-standing partnerships with many media organizations to use content data like articles to ensure they’re optimized to appear in its search engine. The company has used the data to train its large language models, according to two people familiar with the arrangement.

“Google has a licensing deal on the table,” said an executive at a group of newspapers. “They have accepted the principle that there must be a payment . . . but we haven’t gotten to the point of talking about zeros. They recognized that there is a conversation about money that we need to have over the next few months, which is the first step.”

After this article was first published, Google said the paper’s executive’s comment regarding a potential licensing deal is “inaccurate. We are very early and are continuing to work with the ecosystem, including news publishers, to get their input.”

Google would not comment on financial discussions. However, the research firm said it has “ongoing conversations” with news outlets, large and small, in the US, UK and Europe, and has already trained its AI on “publicly available information”, which may include paywalled websites.

The Silicon Valley giant added another option it was considering was how to give publishers more “choice and control” over whether their content becomes part of an AI training dataset, so similar to how it allows websites to opt out of using their content in search.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November, OpenAI head Sam Altman has met with News Corp and The New York Times, according to people familiar with the discussions. The company acknowledged that it has held discussions with publishers and publishing associations from around the world about ways we can work together.

Developing a financial model for using news content to train AI will be extremely difficult, according to editorial leaders. Senior executives at a major US publisher said the news industry was working retroactively because tech companies launched these products without consulting them.

“There was no discussion, so now we have to try to get paid after that happens,” the executive said. “The way they’ve launched these products, the total secrecy, the fact that there’s no transparency, no communication before it happens, there’s reason to be quite pessimistic.”

Media analyst Claire Enders said the talks were “very complicated at the moment”, adding that as each organization takes its own approach, a single trade deal for the media groups is unlikely and could backfire.

Enders added, “Chatbots aren’t going to be credible tools if they’re literally trained primarily on the sewers of misogyny and racism that make up most of the open, accessible text.”

The tech companies building AI are eager to focus on its usefulness in promoting efficiency within newsrooms and improving journalism, and are happy to pay millions to preserve longstanding relationships with the industry, the companies said. people involved in the interviews.

Brad Smith, a vice president at Microsoft, said it was “in the early days of conversations with the media and publishers, and part of that is just helping everyone understand how models are trained.”

“I think our biggest opportunity really is to work with publishers first to think about how they can use AI to drive more revenue,” he added.

Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen said he had met with Disney, Sky and the UK’s Daily Telegraph in recent weeks to discuss how it could develop custom models for companies to use its generative AI for images.

Adobe’s model is trained on images in its stock image library, as well as openly licensed and public domain content whose copyright has expired. Narayen said tailored offers and pricing would depend on the company, but customers could add their own proprietary content to the tool.

Axel Springer’s Döpfner expressed optimism that the deals would be reached because both media organizations and policy makers understood the scale of the challenge more quickly than during the last major wave of technological disruption.

AI companies “know that regulation is coming and they are afraid of it,” he said, adding, “It is in all parties’ interests to find a solution for a healthy ecosystem. If there’s no incentive to create intellectual property, there’s nothing to crawl. And artificial intelligence will become artificial stupidity.