OpenAI Inks Licensing Deals to Bring Vox Media, The Atlantic Content to ChatGPT

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OpenAI announced pacts with two more media companies — Vox Media and The Atlantic — to license their content for the ChatGPT artificial-intelligence chatbot. Under the deals, the companies also will work with OpenAI on a range of product-development initiatives.

In recent months, OpenAI has struck similar deals with companies including News Corp, Dotdash Meredith, the Financial Times and Reddit. In another camp are the New York Times and other newspapers, which have sued OpenAI as well as Microsoft, alleging the tech companies engaged in copyright infringement by using the publishers’ content to train their AI systems.

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Highlighting the discord in this area, The Atlantic published an article on May 24 titled “Media Companies Are Making a Huge Mistake With AI,” in which Jessica Lessin, founder of tech news site The Information, asserted that “News organizations rushing to absolve AI companies of theft are acting against their own interests.”

Deals like the one The Atlantic just announced with OpenAI “amount to settling without litigation,” Lessin wrote. “The publishers willing to roll over this way aren’t just failing to defend their own intellectual property — they are also trading their own hard-earned credibility for a little cash from the companies that are simultaneously undervaluing them and building products quite clearly intended to replace them.”

Financial terms of OpenAI’s deals with Vox Media and The Atlantic weren’t disclosed.

Vox Media, whose properties include Vox, The Verge, Eater, New York Magazine, The Cut, Vulture and SB Nation, will license content to OpenAI that will “help inform ChatGPT’s 100 million users, receiving brand attribution and audience referrals,” according to the company. As part of the agreement, Vox Media will work with OpenAI to build “audience-facing and internal applications and capabilities.”

Among other uses, Vox Media will tap into OpenAI’s tools to enhance its affiliate commerce product, The Strategist Gift Scout, and plans to use OpenAI technology to bolster its Forte first-party data platform. (Disclosure: Penske Media Corp., publisher of Variety, became Vox Media’s largest single shareholder last year after PMC acquired a minority stake in the company reported to be 20%.)