OpenAI offers up to US$5 million to press outlets – 01/04/2024 – Tech

The creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI, has offered between US$1 million (R$4.9 million) and US$5 million (R$24.6 million) per year to American press outlets to train ChatGPT with text and images news, according to the specialized website The Information.

The effort aims to ensure that the development of artificial intelligence models respects intellectual property rules.

American media companies consulted by Information say the offer is lower than expected. “This is a low amount even for small vehicles”, says the article published on the specialized website.

For months, some of the biggest players in the U.S. media industry have been in confidential talks with OpenAI seeking a deal to license content, according to the New York Times. There are, however, two impediments: the price and the terms of use and distribution of the content for the artificial intelligence company.

The NYT itself did not accept the conditions offered and decided to litigate against the creator of ChatGPT and its largest business partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement.

The newspaper alleges, in a lawsuit filed in Federal Court in Manhattan, that millions of texts are being used by artificial intelligence companies without paying royalties.

The outlet does not request a specific amount of compensation, but does ask for accountability for the “loss of billions of dollars” due to the “illegal copying and use of the New York Times’ unique works.”

The newspaper also calls on technology companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from the New York Times.

OpenAI only disclosed in August how to block the company’s bots that scour the internet to separate texts and images used in training artificial intelligence models. At this point, the company’s latest generative AI — GPT-4 — was ready and on the market.

On the other hand, OpenAI reached an agreement for content licensing with the German publisher Axel Springer Ink, responsible for the publications Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Die Welt. The amounts involved in the negotiation were not disclosed at the time.

According to another New York Times report, Apple made offers in excess of US$50 million to license information from media companies for training artificial intelligence models. The iPhone maker works on its own technology and wants to avoid the challenges faced by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which also develops generative AIs such as ChatGPT.

The value proposed by OpenAI is similar to what Facebook offered to license news when it launched the Facebook News Tab in 2019 — it was US$3 million at the time, according to the international press.

The figure, however, is well below the recent agreement reached by Google with Canadian press outlets that stipulated a payment of US$100 million per year to link news articles in the search. These terms were arranged after Canada’s parliament passed a law that forces large internet companies to pay for the reproduction and circulation of news.