Yahoo Finance Financial Times signs licensing deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI
The Financial Times has become the latest media company to sign a deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI as newspapers eye lucrative opportunities to hand over content to train large language models.
The FT today said it had signed a “strategic partnership and licensing agreement” with OpenAI to “enhance ChatGPT with attributed content, help improve its models’ usefulness by incorporating FT journalism, and collaborate on developing new AI products and features for FT readers.”
FT Group CEO John Ridding said the deal “recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI.
“We have long been a leader in news media innovation, pioneering the subscription model and engagement technologies, and this partnership will help keep us at the forefront of developments in how people access and use information.”
The terms of the deal, including the fees involved and the length of the partnership, were not disclosed -- despite the FT’s editor insisting that the newspaper “will be transparent, within the FT and with our readers” on the nature of its use of AI, in a letter published last year.
It comes as academics and senior media commentators have warned of the dangers of individual news organisations signing confidential agreements with AI businesses.
Speaking at the International Journalism Festival earlier this month, Emily Bell, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, said: “The real problem for publishers and journalists is how much external pressure there is at the moment, either from your ownership or external organisations saying ‘adopt these tools.’
“There’s a lot of cheque-signing going on in the private sector at the moment [which are] very tempting deals…that news organisations find hard to turn down because there isn’t a lot of money out there for innovation in news.
“There’s a real [sense of] ‘get on board, don’t miss the train.’ I’m here to tell you I’m old enough that I remember when the train left the station last time with lots of publishers on it. It was the wrong train and it would have been a lot better if they’d missed it.”
Anya Schiffrin, Senior Lecturer at Columbia, added: “It's these really large American companies that are scooping up information and then doing deals secretly with certain publishers that they choose to speak to.
“Publishers need to work collectively [but] these large secretive companies are dividing and conquering.”
The FT’s own AI editor, Madhumita Murgia, has also warned of the threat of “industrial capture” in AI development in which “a handful of individuals and corporations now control much of the resources and knowledge in the sector.”
Other major news organisations such as the New York Times have sued OpenAI over its alleged use of the publisher’s content to train its models, accusing the firm of seeking “to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism”.
But OpenAI investor Microsoft has rebuffed the lawsuit’s claims, comparing them to Hollywood’s resistance to the VCR over fears the technology would destroy its business model.
