AI models using content that belongs to others has been in the news. Most of us have probably heard about Scarlett Johansson’s beef with Open AI, where the actor claimed the AI company used her voice to endow Chat GPT with a human-sounding voice. That claim was debunked this week, according to the Washington Post.
According to the Post, records show that Open AI hired a nonunion actor, not Johansson, for that task. And the requirements for the hired actor did not specify emulating ScarJo.
However, OpenAI’s Sam Altman did at one point contact Johansson about the project, perhaps independently of his team’s efforts on the project, and ScarJo demurred. And his infamous May 13 “her” tweet didn’t exactly clear things up. Many saw the tweet as a reference to the movie “Her” in which Johansson plays an AI bot.
Whatever really happened, the story did shine a light on the challenge content creators face in the AI era. How do they protect their intellectual property (a voice, likeness, song, newspaper article, screenplay, etc.) from the likes of Open AI using them as a training set?
One way is to cut a deal. That appears to be just what News Corp. (parent company of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post) has done with OpenAI.
According to the New York Times, on Wednesday, News Corp. announced that “it had agreed to a deal with OpenAI to share its content to train and service artificial intelligence chatbots.”
The Times reports that the deal covers News Corp. properties in the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom. It includes its financial publications Baron’s and MarketWatch.
L24: Headline Talk – Brandon Grosvenor, CRO, Torstar
You Gotta Pay Us
At Localogy’s recent L24 conference in Arlington, Texas, Torstar Media CRO Brandon Grosvenor sat for a fireside chat with my colleague Mike Boland. Running a newspaper company in the LLM era was a key discussion point.
And LLM’s liberal use of newspaper content as a training set certainly came up. Grosvenor expressed skepticism over government regulation of AI company’s use of traditional media content.
Yet he also said, flatly. “if you are using my content for monetary gain, you should pay me.”
Torstar’s flagship property is the Toronto Star. Torstar has 25 million subscribers and 65 million monthly unique visitors.
In a LinkedIn post sharing news of the News Corp.-Open AI deal, Grosvenor suggested the deal is a bit of a double-edged sword.
“Will it fracture the publishing industry further or start to even the playing field between creators and distribution platforms,” Grosvenor wrote.
The Times said financial terms of the News Corp.-Open AI deal were not disclosed. The Wall Street Journal did report that the agreement could be worth as much as $250 million over five years.
What’s interesting here is that both sides seem to have learned a lesson from the past. Open AI seems to have decided it was better to pay for content that didn’t belong to them but that they could access fairly easily.
The newspaper industry, or at least News Corp., decided that it is better to get out in front of this and cut a deal than it is to stick their heads in the sand, only to howl and file lawsuits once the horses have left the barn.
Now let’s see if other deals follow.
