Sara Fischer – Exclusive: Product deals with OpenAI

This piece is by WWSG exclusive thought leader, Sara Fischer.

The Atlantic, one of the oldest magazines in the U.S., and Vox Media, one of the nation’s largest digital media holding companies, have both inked separate licensing and product deals with ChatGPT parent OpenAI.

Why it matters: The deals give OpenAI added momentum in its quest for credible content to train its algorithms and inform its chatbots — and could also protect the Microsoft-backed company further from future copyright liability.

How it works: Both multi-year partnerships include agreements in which OpenAI is able to license the publishers’ archived content to train its AI models.

• The Atlantic has been publishing content since 1857. Vox Media is home to more than a dozen major internet content brands, such as Vox, The Verge, Eater, The Cut, Vulture and SB Nation. Its New York Magazine brand has been publishing since 1968.
• Both agreements also allow OpenAI to tap into the respective publishers’ current content to fuel responses to user queries in OpenAI products, including ChatGPT.
• OpenAI will include citations to their work when it’s referenced in a response to a user query and will link out to the relevant article.
• In a statement, The Atlantic said it will also work with OpenAI to help shape how news is surfaced and presented in any future real-time discovery products from OpenAI.

Follow the money: Deal terms weren’t disclosed, but it’s safe to assume both publishers are being compensated for their content — that’s how previous deals between publishers and OpenAI have been structured.

Between the lines: Both deals also include agreements in which the publications can leverage OpenAI’s technology to power new journalism products.

The Atlantic’s product team will get access to OpenAI’s technology for a new experimental effort called Atlantic Labs.

• Through Atlantic Labs, The Atlantic will experiment with developing new AI-driven products and features. Atlantic Labs will leverage OpenAI’s tech but also partner with other AI companies.
• The Atlantic’s product team will give OpenAI feedback from its experiments and will share use cases for how AI can improve news experiences in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.

Vox Media will leverage OpenAI’s technology to build internal and audience-facing capabilities and products, the company said in a statement.

• Internally, Vox will leverage OpenAI’s tech for its first party data platform, Forte, to bolster advertising creative optimization and audience targeting capabilities.
• Externally, Vox plans to use OpenAI’s technology to support content discovery and recommendations on its websites. For instance, Vox will match shoppers with gifts endorsed by its consumer recommendations site, The Strategist.

The big picture: More major news companies are opting to strike deals with OpenAI rather than pursue litigation, for different reasons.

• In some cases, the deals themselves may end up delivering as much or more cash than a lawsuit settlement — a lot quicker. The deals also help publishers eager to put AI to work in their businesses.
• The Atlantic’s CEO Nicholas Thompson, for example, said in a statement announcing the deal, “We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future.”

What to watch: Organizations that have opted to sue OpenAI instead of striking deals, such as The New York Times and several major regional newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital, may not get the same experimental access to OpenAI’s products and tech, but they could have more to gain financially from a lawsuit.

• The Times, for example, has claimed billions in statutory damages in its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, based on a large number of filed copyright registrations for its work.
• Wall Street Journal parent News Corp. also has copyright registrations that it could use to claim statutory damages, but it opted to strike a licensing deal with OpenAI last week.