San Francisco (awp/afp) – The Financial Times (FT) and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, signed a contract on Monday to license content from the British daily for the American artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, which is accused by other media of copyright infringement.
The license agreement will allow ChatGPT to provide its users with “news summaries attributed to the Financial Times, quotes and links (to the newspaper’s website) in response to relevant questions”, an FT statement said.
By “incorporating FT journalism”, this “strategic partnership” will help improve the usefulness of OpenAI models, the media further assures.
“Models” are the technology underlying generative AI interfaces, which make it possible to produce texts, images, etc., upon simple query in everyday language.
They have generated a lot of enthusiasm since the end of 2022, but also a lot of concern, because the giants of Silicon Valley have collected astronomical quantities of data on the internet to “train” them.
Many authors, artists and news sites accuse these companies of copyright infringement. At the end of December, the New York Times launched proceedings against OpenAI and Microsoft, the main investor in this start-up.
But in recent months, the creator of ChatGPT has undertaken to enter into content licensing agreements with media outlets – including the AP press agency, the German group Axel Springer, the French daily Le Monde and the Spanish conglomerate Prisa Media – to enrich its models.
“It is obviously right that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material,” commented John Ridding, the boss of the Financial Times, quoted in the press release.
“OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution [des sources] and compensation, all of which are essential to us. At the same time, it is clearly in the interests of users that these products contain reliable sources,” he added.
The contract also provides for the two companies to develop together “new AI tools and functionalities” for readers of the prestigious daily.
The FT specifies that earlier this year it became a client of ChatGPT, which markets paid subscriptions to businesses, “in order to ensure that its teams are well versed with the technology and can benefit from the creativity and productivity gains made possible by OpenAI tools”.
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