NYT gives up coalition to negotiate with artificial intelligence – 08/15/2023 – Market

The New York Times left talks with The Wall Street Journal’s News Corp, aiming to form a coalition to defend the interests of journalism against the Big Techs that have been dominating the artificial intelligence scenario in the US, according to the Semafor website.

In addition to the two, Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker and Vogue, and Axel Springer, from Politico and Business Insider, among other publishers, were also participating in the negotiations. The expectation now is that each group closes separate agreements with technology companies.

According to a director at Digital Content Next, an association that brings together journalistic companies like NYT and the Associated Press agency, but not the WSJ, there are ongoing conversations between larger publishers and AI companies, seeking to establish licensing agreements.

Chris Pedigo, senior vice-president of DCN, in an interview with the advertising magazine Adweek, detailed that the eventual agreements aim at financial compensation to the vehicles, for the use of content in the training of generative AI tools, but also other aspects of the relationship.

The conversations would be approaching, for example, how the credit of the content will be presented to the vehicles and what will be the mechanisms to reduce the generation of material with information errors, which have been common since the launch of the pioneering ChatGPT in November.

Among the Big Techs at the forefront of AI development in the US are OpenAI, from ChatGPT, which has Microsoft among its shareholders, Google and Meta, from Facebook. Its generative AI tools would already be using vehicle content for training, without authorization.

A first contract was closed between AP and OpenAI a month ago. According to the joint statement, which provided no figures, “the agreement sees licensing OpenAI as part of AP’s text file, while AP will leverage OpenAI’s technology and product expertise.”

At the same time, the NYT two weeks ago added AI to its Terms and Conditions of Use, that is, to the rules with which it is necessary to agree when using the application or the newspaper’s website.

Now, it is stated that it is not allowed to “use the content for the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence system”.

Newspaper content is defined as that which “includes but is not limited to text, photographs, images, illustrations, designs, audio clips, video clips, ‘look and feel’, metadata, data or compilations”.