Time Inc. and OpenAI entered into a multi-year partnership this week that would allow the artificial intelligence company to train its chatbots on the magazine’s content.
In an announcement Thursday, OpenAI said the deal will benefit the growing AI field and the struggling journalism industry.
“We’re partnering with Time to make it easier for people to access news content through our AI tools, and to support reputable journalism by providing proper attribution to original sources,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said Thursday in a statement.
Under the terms of the deal, users who prompt OpenAI’s ChatGPT could get an answer that contains a link to a Time magazine article. Time will also get exclusive access to OpenAI’s tools. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
The deal also offers a potentially lucrative profit source for Time, during a time of dwindling revenue in legacy news media.
For OpenAI, the deal generates a good deal of legitimacy for the company, which has been accused of copyright infringement and outright theft from other media outlets.
When OpenAI was first started, the company trained its AI models on massive amounts of data from all over the internet, including journalism. This led to lawsuits from legacy media companies like The New York Times, which accused the company of stealing its content for training.
OpenAI has since inked deals with the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, The Financial Times, Vox and The Atlantic which were similar to the most recent agreement with Time magazine.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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