OpenAI is Reportedly Offering Content Licensing Deals to Publishers

According to a report from The Information (paywalled), OpenAI has started offering content licensing deals to publishers to rightfully use their content to train their AI models. OpenAI and other companies developing generative AI products have been using news articles and other public data to train their AI models, but they apparently did so without worrying too much about intellectual property rights.

“OpenAI has offered some media firms as little as between $1 million and $5 million annually to license their news articles for use in training its large language models, according to two executives who have recently negotiated with the tech company. That’s a tiny amount even for small publishers, which could make it difficult for OpenAI to strike deals,” the report reads.

According to the report, Apple is also negotiating with content publishers to license their content, and the company is reportedly offering them better terms. “Apple is offering more money but also wants the right to use content more widely than what OpenAI is seeking,” a person familiar with the matter told The Information. “Apple wants to be able to use content for future AI products in any way the company deems necessary,” this same source said.

The news come just a week after The New York Times announced that it was suing both OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, seeking billions of dollars in damages along the way. And as Paul pointed out last week, Google went through the same troubles in the past and had to compensate publishers around the world for the use of their material in search results and its news portal.

Last year, Elon Musk also threatened to sue Microsoft for illegally using Twitter data for training purposes, but this didn’t go anywhere. Anyway, the New York Times lawsuit is a much more serious affair. If OpenAI and other companies need to pay a significant amount of money to publishers to train their AI model (something activity that’s already resource-intensive and costly), this could really make the development of generative AI technology unsustainable in the near future.