Vox Media president Pam Wasserstein sent a Slack message and email to staff on May 29 detailing news that the company's journalists said was shocking: Vox had signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI.
The deal gives the AI company access to Vox's full archive of current content and journalism work to train ChatGPT and other models. Wasserstein's alert came just before Axios exclusively revealed details of the licensing and product agreement, much to the surprise of his reporters.
Atlantic's reporter who signed a contract as a major AI giant Microsoft was not notified in advance.
“Atlantic staff mainly knows the contract from external information sources, and the company and Openai have refused to answer questions regarding contract conditions,” said the Atlantic Union on May 30.
Current and former journalists from both companies interviewed by TechCrunch never expected their jobs to be handed over to OpenAI, and they all worry their employers are making a shortsighted deal that will ultimately hurt writers and journalism as a whole.
Vox Media (which includes The Verge, New York, Eater, The Cut, and others) and The Atlantic have published articles critical of OpenAI and generative AI. Amy McCarthy, a reporter for Eater and communications chair for Vox's union, said the articles raise concerns about the environmental impact of the electricity needed to run large language models, turmoil on OpenAI's board, and the company's “general lack of credibility.”
VOX did not respond to the comment request.
Since the deal was announced, journalists at each publication have been meeting with business executives to learn more about the deal, and they've been asking for one key piece of information: What's in it for journalists?
Emergency feeling
Faced with a rise in AI media deals, the news industry is accelerating negotiations to put in place AI protections similar to those fought for by Hollywood writing teams.
“The Writers Guild and the Vox Media Union firmly believe that even if there's no AI clause in the contract, the introduction of AI is a must-have for negotiation,” McCarthy told TechCrunch. “The contract basically contains a clause that says the company has to negotiate with us about fundamental changes to working conditions. We strongly believe that this is a workplace issue, this is a working conditions issue, and that the company has an obligation to negotiate with us about how this works.”
This means that publishers who enter into agreements with AI providers may be contractually obliged to consult and negotiate these changes with trade unions.
The Atlantic Media Union also intended to bring the issue to the negotiating table, but the OpenAI deal added urgency to the effort, said a current employee who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity.
This month's negotiations have not yet been proposed to use AI in accordance with journalism and ethics as a substitute for writing, confirmation, and illustrations.
Other unions are taking the same protection measures, and Nebraska Journalists have released the AI -producing articles in the early days of Nebraska Journalists this year. We demanded the right to say about how to implement AI in the member's workflow.
It is extremely important that the company has been scraped by the company, such as a company, is not guaranteed. Chatbot claims that the whole material does not replicate.
However, publications including The New York Times, Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept have sued OpenAI for using journalists' work to train ChatGPT without properly crediting or citing it. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and other companies building generative AI.
Richard Tofel, former president of the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica and a news organization consultant, believes these cases will ultimately end up in the Supreme Court: If the court finds OpenAI or others guilty of copyright infringement, “they'll have to settle with everybody.”
Tofel believes that most publishers will eventually sign up for AI companies, and Google also faced the same copyright lawsuit when searching products began to spread, but when they were solved, they were greatly dependent on searching. He pointed out that there was no publisher he wanted to remove.
McCarthy said authors cannot rely solely on the courts: “We need to explore all options for fighting the introduction of AI.”
Another concern for journalists is publishers' adoption of AI in content creation, with some media outlets already starting to experiment.
CNET and Gannett have published articles and art generated by AI, and in the case of Sports Illustrated, it is mainly accused of being forged, but it is mainly miserable, but AI can learn the high quality journalism. Then, these obvious errors may decrease over time.
If journalists don’t question this, who will?
Journalists understand the basic structure of the deal, but still have questions.
Anna Bloss, vice president of communications for The Atlantic, said the partnership, like other publisher deals, positions the company as a premium news source within OpenAI.
“The Atlantic articles can be discovered in Openai products, including Chatgpt. “This contract will secure a guardrail and protection of how our content will be displayed in Openai. If the article of Atlantic is displayed, an Atlantic brand will be displayed and a link to the article on our site will be posted.”
Bross pointed out that this is not a syndication license, which means that OpenAI does not have permission to reproduce The Atlantic articles or to make similar copies of the entire articles or longer excerpts.
However, the atlantic journalists are still waiting for a secondary reward if they are a secondary work for such content. Several sources told the tech crunch to raise the rewards to the writers to the secondary work.
The Atlantic's editorial staff raised the topic at an all-hands meeting led by the magazine's CEO, Nick Thompson, in mid-June and learned that while ChatGPT has access to their articles, the editorial team is otherwise “fairly insulated.”
In other words, there is no imminent threat of ChatGPT being used to write articles.
The financial conditions of Atlantic and VOX have not yet been revealed by the journalists in both newspapers, but the company's technology is not used to imitate the writer's own voice.
Wall Street Journal's parent company, News Corp., has made a contract with the Open AI, which is said to be worth more than $ 250 million in five years.
Other media outlets that already have similar partnerships with OpenAI include Dotdash Meredith (publisher of People, Better Homes & Gardens, Allrecipes, Investopedia, etc.), The Associated Press, the Financial Times, France's Le Monde, and Spain's Prisa Media.
(It's also worth noting that TechCrunch's parent company, Yahoo, is also working on AI through its Yahoo News app, which uses the underlying code from Artifact, an app Yahoo acquired in April.)
OpenAI claims the deal will drive traffic back to articles and help journalists, but implementation has yet to begin, so it remains to be seen how well it will perform.
Tofel said that if users were able to ask an AI chatbot for the latest updates on the war between Israel and Hamas, for example, it would be “a news organization's ultimate nightmare.”
“AI news products have the potential to remove the middleman to a large extent,” he said.
OpenAI was unable to confirm any user experience design details that might determine the likelihood of a reader clicking on an external link to an article.
Also, advertising revenues would fall if readers no longer had to go to publishers' websites to read articles — a problem the news industry already faces after Google and Meta deprioritized news in their algorithms — and journalists and writers would find their work less readable.
The main reasons for the lack of funds are that Meta and Google are currently welcoming a new source of income.
But journalists are wondering if this is the best path.
“It's like a protection racket,” McCarthy said. “It's like making a deal with a guy who robbed our house and pinky promising him he's not going to rob our house again.”
Some of the AI startups have already been accused of plagiarism by Chatgpt's rivals, for example, plagiarism of Chatgpt's rivals without signs. Despite the claim, PERPLEXITY was preparing to announce an advertising revenue agreement with the publisher.
Nevertheless, all publishers are expected to reach the same conclusion that “AI will steal our work in any case.