OpenAI is offering some media outlets $1 million to $5 million in exchange for using their news stories to train the models behind ChatGPT. According to The Information, these license fees are considered “a tiny amount even for small publishers.”
The publication cites two media executives who participated in the recent negotiations.
The talks come as the company finds itself at the center of a massive copyright infringement lawsuit from The New York Times.
Key facts
Last month, OpenAI struck a deal with publishing giant Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico and Business Insider, and a deal with the Associated Press last summer. Financial terms of those deals were not disclosed, but Axel Springer will receive tens of millions of dollars over several years, according to the publication. OpenAI's two tech rivals, Google and Apple, are also trying to strike deals with news outlets to supply content for their AI products. Apple is reportedly offering media outlets higher payouts in exchange for broader usage rights while developing its own AI tools. Google has lagged behind from the other two companies in talks to use artificial intelligence, but has established relationships with some media outlets through its licensing agreements for the Google News service.
The talks come amid growing concern among media and creative people about their content being used to train large language models. ChatGPT and other AI chatbots learn from endless streams of data from the Internet.
A recent lawsuit from The New York Times even points to specific instances where chatbots repeated the newspaper's content.