December 14, 2023 – Publishing giant Axel Springer and the developer behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, have announced a groundbreaking agreement. This unprecedented collaboration allows ChatGPT to generate summaries of news articles from media outlets such as Politico and Business Insider. Axel Springer has now become the world’s first publishing organization to deepen its integration with artificial intelligence technology, marking a significant milestone as media seeks compensation for the use of their content in AI tools.
This agreement comes at a time when various publishing houses, artists, writers, and tech experts are taking legal action or considering lawsuits against companies developing generative AI tools. These tools have been accused of using their content or works in their training data.
Under the newly effective OpenAI and Axel Springer agreement, when users pose questions to ChatGPT, it will respond with summaries of news articles from sources like Politico, Business Insider, Bild, and Welt. The chatbot will also provide access to some articles that were originally restricted to subscribers, all while “attributing sources and linking to the full articles for transparency,” according to a press release.
This partnership closely follows OpenAI’s agreement with the Associated Press in July, which allowed OpenAI to use AP’s news archives as training data.
As part of this agreement, Axel Springer will supply its media brands’ content to OpenAI’s large language models, such as the GPT-4, for training data.
A research report released in October by the News Media Alliance, a trade organization representing over 2,200 publishers, indicated that datasets used to train popular AI models heavily rely on content from publishers. This reliance on publisher content is significantly greater, ranging from over 5 times to nearly 100 times, compared to general web content.
