“This is a letter opening negotiations. » Pierre Petillault, director general of the General Information Press Alliance (APIG), summarizes, Friday June 7, the letter sent recently by his professional French media organization and its counterpart the Union of Magazine Press Editors ( SEPM) to 25 manufacturers of artificial intelligence models: OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT conversational robot, but also Google, the French company Mistral – with which “informal discussions” already exist – and other players like Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Anthropic or PerplexityAI.
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Publishers want to know if their content has been used to train large text and image generation models. They request discussions with a view to obtaining remuneration, in exchange for their authorization to access their articles, photos, etc. They ask for a response within a month.
“If we do not get a satisfactory response, we reserve the right to go to litigation, even if it is not the first option,” warns Mr. Petillault. In the press, the American daily New York Times thus filed a complaint against OpenAI after negotiating for several months with Sam Altman’s company. Image banks have also chosen the legal route by attacking AI manufacturers, such as Stable Diffusion.
Notify their refusal
From the summer of 2023, most French media have chosen to indicate their refusal to see their content used for free, by placing small files on their sites that are invisible to readers and intended for “robots” sent by big AI makers to suck up text and images from the web: Radio France, France Media World (France 24, RFI…), TF1, Ouest France, Les Echos, Le Figaro, Le Monde… This right of refusal – or “opt out” – was created by the 2019 copyright directive which, conversely, authorizes by default the exploitation or mining of content (“data mining”).
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Since then, several press groups have concluded paid agreements with OpenAI: the German Springer (BildPolitico, Business Insider…), the Spanish Prisa Media (El País), the American The Atlantic and the English-speaking giant NewsCorp (The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph…). These partnerships cover the use of content for training models but also for display on a future version of ChatGPT which, for questions related to current events, will rely on articles for its answers, by attaching them to a link to the publisher’s website.
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