OpenAI pays news publishers up to $5m a year to legally train AI on their content - media

The OpenAI company is ready to pay publishers from $1 million to $5 million per year for the right to use copyrighted news materials to train its artificial intelligence models.

Here's What We Know

This is one of the first concrete indications of how much tech companies are willing to pay for content licensing. The amount announced is in line with recent reports, Apple is also in talks with media companies and is willing to spend at least $50 million over several years to acquire data to train AI.

The figures look about the same as other non-AI licensing deals. According to media reports, when Facebook launched its news tab, Meta offered large publishers up to $3 million a year for the right to show headlines and announcements of their content.

At the same time, the total amount of money that tech giants are willing to spend on AI content could be much higher. In 2020, Google announced a $1bn partnership with media companies, and more recently the company agreed to pay Canadian media $100m a year for the right to link to their publications.

According to sources, OpenAI and Apple aren't the only ones in talks with publishers. The same Google demonstrated to the heads of major American newspapers an AI tool called Genesis, capable of generating news texts based on facts.

Previously, technology companies have faced blockades and lawsuits over the use of news content without the owners' consent. In particular, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement in training ChatGPT. Entering into licence agreements will allow them to avoid similar problems in the future.

Source: The Information