The Financial Times is the most recent news outlet to partner with OpenAI. The Financial Times and OpenAI announced jointly on Monday that ChatGPT’s creator will train its AI models with the publication’s news and work with the Financial Times to create new AI services and products for its readers. When ChatGPT incorporates material from the Financial Times into its comments, it will also provide credit and a link back to the magazine.
According to Financial Times CEO John Ridding, “it is right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material,” and the Times is “committed to human journalism.” The agreement’s financial specifics were not revealed by either business. The Information revealed earlier this year that OpenAI pays publishers a licensing fee of $1 million to $5 million year for the use of their content in training its artificial intelligence models.
Generative AI is only as good as the training data used to train the models that power it. So far, AI companies have scraped everything they can from the public internet often without the consent of creators, and are constantly on the hunt for new data sources to keep the outputs generated by these models current. Training AI models on news is one way to achieve that, but some publishers are wary of giving up their content to AI companies for free. The New York Times and the BBC, for instance, have OpenAI from scraping their websites.
As a result, OpenAI has been striking financial deals with leading publishers to keep its models trained. Last year, the company partnered with German publisher Axel Springer to train its models on new from Politico and Business Insider in the US and Bild and Die Welt in Germany. The company also has deals with the Associated Press, France’s Le Monde, and Spain’s Prisa Media.
