The UK’s news landscape could fracture “irreparably” in the next five to ten years with “grim” implications, a new Parliamentary report has warned.

The Future of News report from the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee noted that although a “changing news landscape should not be conflated with its imminent demise”, many media publishers will not survive the new dynamics.

The report made recommendations for action that could help stave off some of the challenges, ranging from firmer action on AI copyright theft to the creation of news “accelerators” and tax breaks for local journalism.

Without action, and potentially with it, the committee warned there is “a realistic possibility” that the UK will see the emergence of a “two-tier media environment” in which a minority of the population is well-served by high-quality, paywalled news while the rest are left with low-quality free information.

The committee said that this “is not a hypothetical worry: the contours of this scenario are already apparent.

“If current trends continue, the gap between those consuming professional journalism and those who do not will widen at pace. There is a realistic possibility of the UK’s news environment fracturing irreparably along social, regional and economic lines within the next five to ten years.”

The committee said it did not believe any silver bullet solutions exist for these problems and that “much of the work needs to be led by industry itself”.

But the role of the Government, it found, should be “to establish the conditions that enable the sector to stand on its own feet and survive a protracted period of technological turbulence”.

Lord Communications and Digital Committee calls for urgent creation of UK AI regime that protects publisher copyright

Among its recommendations, the Lords report said the Government needs to rapidly develop an artificial intelligence regime that encourages innovation without fatally compromising publisher copyright.

Good economic and security reasons for encouraging AI training in the UK, they wrote, did not mean the Government “should pursue rules that primarily benefit foreign tech firms (who seem prepared to pay vast sums on energy, computing facilities and staff—but not on data)…

“Previous efforts to find a solution have been weak and ineffectual.”

Any new regime on AI bots scraping publisher content to power their systems, it said, “must include transparency mechanisms that enable rights holders to check whether their data has been used”, backed up with “meaningful sanctions for non-compliance”.

But it warned against adopting “a flawed opt-out regime comparable to the version operating in the EU.

“Much better means for ensuring technical viability, transparency, consent and enforcement are needed for a new text and data mining regime to work to UK advantage.”

In February the committee said it was insufficient for the (then Conservative) government to “sit on its hands” and wait for issues around copyright and AI to be solved by years of case law.

Lords suggests expansion of search and social media regulation

The peers recommended as a priority that the Competition and Markets Authority should investigate any tech firms “leveraging dominance in one domain, notably internet search, to secure anti-competitive advantages in obtaining data for generative AI training”.

News Media Association chief executive Owen Meredith described this recommendation as “very timely, as the regulator considers which firms and services to prioritise under the new regime for digital markets”.

Similarly, the committee advised the Government to give Ofcom “the necessary powers to investigate tech firm recommender algorithms and the operations of large language models”.

Sudden changes to content recommendation algorithms, for example at Facebook, have significantly disrupted traffic and revenue at publishers in recent years, and some publishers have previously expressed concern that they have been made less visible on social media or in search because of their politics.

The committee also said they had been “disappointed” that the Labour government’s proposed changes to the media plurality regime did not go further.

“The decision to exclude online intermediaries [i.e. social media and search engines] looks oddly short-sighted given the rapid advances in tech firms’ ability to produce news summaries.

“We appreciate that tech firms are not newspapers but this does not mean their evolving role in the news landscape should be overlooked…

“The previous government’s years-long timeline for implementing vital changes has been inadequate,” they added, recommending the government commit to responding to future Ofcom priority recommendations on media plurality within a year.

GB News ‘needs to comply with the spirit’ of impartiality rules while Ofcom needs to be more transparent about its standards, lords say

Other recommendations included a “Future News catalyst scheme” modelled on start-up accelerators, action against legal action used to silence journalism, and tax breaks for hiring local journalists.

The report argued that the Government should consult on allowing a wider range of news providers to carry public notices, which are worth millions in revenue each year but can currently only be published in print newspapers. However it cautioned that using local government advertising to support the media “risks becoming a market distortion”.

And it recommended that the Government’s online advertising taskforce should “review the work and impact of brand safety organisations on news publisher revenue”, which publishers such as Unherd say have unjustifiably harmed their revenue.

On impartiality in television news, the peers said GB News “needs to comply with the spirit of the rules, not stretch them to breaking point”, advising Ofcom to carry out more detailed assessments of audience views on politicians serving as presenters on news channels.

But the peers added that public service broadcasters like the BBC “should reflect on why alternative providers are finding a following and how this relates to the way underserved communities are represented in their own news coverage”.

The committee also wrote that, although Ofcom’s leaders had said the regulator’s approach to impartiality had been clear, “we struggled to reconcile this with the evidence”.

“More transparency in future would help, particularly around the thresholds at which alternative interpretations of the rules might apply.”

GB News responded that it had raised concerns about Ofcom’s unclear approach to impartiality “repeatedly.”

The broadcaster also said: “We take our responsibilities under the Ofcom Broadcasting Code extremely seriously and remain committed to operating a comprehensive compliance regime. But we also strongly believe that this regime should be modern, fit for purpose and much clearer.

“It’s vital the Government establishes conditions to support honest, accurate and informative news which enables the UK media to stand on its own feet through sector-wide structural changes that drive innovation – whilst maintaining media independence.”

The report also warned against schemes that “risk overreach” such as a Government-endorsed kitemark for trusted news.

Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes, writing in The Telegraph, described this as “among its best recommendations… it would be a mistake for our industry to invite government in as an arbiter of our credibility.”

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Daily Mail publisher DMG Media has made a “significant investment” in Prorata.ai, a generative artificial intelligence platform that plans to share revenue with publishers each time their content is used to answer a user query.

The deal gives Prorata access to DMG Media’s content, which includes the archives of the Mail, Mail Online, Metro, the i and New Scientist.

Guardian Media Group and Sky News all also announced on Wednesday that they have made their content available to the start-up, and they were joined on Thursday by magazine Prospect.

The Financial Times reports that the DMG Media investment values Prorata at about $130m (£100m). Press Gazette understands Sky News is also considering investing in the start-up.

DMG Media on Prorata: ‘It could be the cornerstone of a sustainable economic model for news’

Prorata has not yet launched any public-facing products, but has already signedsimilar content-sharing deals with the Financial Times, Fortune, Axel Springer and The Atlantic.

The company has previously told Press Gazette that it has created a mechanism that lets AI platforms determine “the value of contributing content” in a generative AI response and as a result “calculate proportional compensation” for the originators of that content. It has said it will make the technology available to license to other AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Prorata says it will share half the revenue from its forthcoming subscriptions to its licensing partners.

The business hopes to provide a solution to publishers who don’t want to be left behind should consumers move toward generative AI-powered search, but who have been burned by other AI companies who have ingested their content to create their large language models without providing any compensation.

[Read more: News Corp seeks massive damages from AI firm Perplexity for stealing content]

DMG Media vice chairman Rich Caccappolo said its deal with Prorata made the company “the first UK news publisher to invest in an equity stake in this industry-leading platform”.

“The rise of large language models and real-time content scraping represents a material threat to the news industry. There is a critical need to attribute content used by LLMs to generate answers and compensate all content creators for their work.

“ProRata’s platform is a vital first step toward advancing accurate and fair attribution and promoting transparency. It could be the cornerstone of a sustainable economic model for news publishers, giving them the incentive to continue investing in high-quality, informative journalism.”

David Rhodes, the executive chairman of Sky News, said: “Global audiences trust Sky News to give them the full story, first. ProRata’s solution helps advance that high-quality, impartial journalism across AI platforms and publishers.

“With all our partners today we’re securing our company’s massive investment in fair and accurate news reporting – now, and well into the future.”

Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson said: “The trusted, quality journalism for which The Guardian is world-renowned must be fairly credited and valued when used by AI platforms. Prorata respects and promotes these fundamental principles, and we are pleased to be partnering with them.”

And Prospect chief executive Mark Beard said: “In this age of disinformation, we respect and warmly approve of Prorata.ai’s approach. We share Prorata.ai’s belief that fact-checked, authoritative journalism is critical and will not only survive but thrive, if the publishers who produce it are credited and fairly rewarded alongside the technology companies that surface it.”  

Prorata’s chief executive Bill Gross told Press Gazette in August: “Current AI answer engines rely on shoplifted, plagiarised content. This creates an environment where creators get nothing, and disinformation thrives…

“Our technology allows creators to get credited and compensated while consumers get attributed, accurate answers. This solution will lead to a broader movement across the entire AI industry.”

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The Telegraph set out in March to launch 12 significant uses of AI in its newsroom over 12 months.

The tools include newsroom workflow aides, consumer-facing AI services and internal data discovery tools. They are packaged together in an internal tool called Pulse AI so staff have a one-stop shop for the new services.

The Telegraph‘s director of technology Dylan Jacques told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast he had found it more valuable to “learn through doing” instead of getting bogged down in policy questions over AI.

“What we decided to do at the beginning of this year was really make a concerted step change and a bit of commitment to the organisation that we’re going to see through a practical set of tools in practice. We didn’t want it to be ‘this is coming, this is coming’ and it drag on too long.

“We essentially pulled together a bit of a mission statement, if you like, that said we need to understand this in practice quite soon. We didn’t want to be spending six months or 12 months on a concept that then turned out to not be that valuable or hard to achieve.”

‘If you can improve engagement, all boats rise with that tide’

Jacques said the new products, which are using a “whole range of tools from across a multitude of vendors”, are already providing “real business value” and “definite investable opportunity”.

He explained: “So far it’s been tied into improved customer engagement. If you can improve engagement, then all of the boats rise with that tide really, and subscriptions will flow from that.”

The Telegraph has been running a subscriptions-first strategy since 2018 and it ended last year with 1,035,710 subscriptions, including more than 200,000 added with the company’s acquisition of the Chelsea Magazine Company.

Jacques said AI-generated summaries at the top of email newsletters have led to a 20% increase in click-through rates. These summaries are not used on every email – some are still human-written – but Jacques noted that as personalised content grows and people are sent different articles depending on their interests, journalists will not be able to write a version for each reader, whereas gen AI can.

Telegraph readers may also have noticed AI-generated summaries appearing at the top of some articles with a disclaimer.

Jacques said: “There was a lot of internal debate as to whether or not this is something that actually really adds value to the consumer, and points can be made either way. Obviously, our journalism is our product. It’s what we’re all here to do. And using AI products to summarise that, it might help certain people, whether they’re time poor on their commute, but if it detracts from people really spending the time to fully examine the journalism, it’s not necessarily the best thing for the organisation and journalism in the long term.”

Swedish daily Aftonbladet said last year that people were spending longer on articles with AI-generated summaries at the top. Jacques said this has not proved the case at The Telegraph but that page views per sessions tend to go up when people are given these summaries.

“We quite quickly understood that the dwell time did dip, but actually that’s not the end of the world.

“We’ve A/B tested showing summary points on articles at a fair amount of scale and we’re reasonably confident that page views per session goes up by a fairly clear, statistically significant number.”

Modern gen AI technology has meant ‘big leap forward’

The Telegraph is also looking at using generative AI to translate its flagship Ukraine: The Latest podcast which has an “enormous international audience” including Ukrainian and Russian speakers.

“One of the things that gen AI has enabled us to explore is translating our podcasts in a way that is usable and digestible in those native language,” Jacques said, adding that previously the tech meant it could be done but “in quite a robotic way”.

“I think they rely on sort of translating it to text and then reverse translating it back,” he said. “And actually what some of the more modern gen AI services have enabled us to do is create translations that are quite true to the voices of the presenters… and it does it in quite a seamless and impressive way. And actually it’s maintaining the cadence of voice and the fluidity of the discussion much better than the previous, much more robotic services could do. So that’s been a big leap forward.

“And I think that’s going to be a really interesting one because that’s another area where while we would love to have journalists and audio presenters in all sorts of languages, it’s not realistic to expect that we would ever be able to extend our model to ever achieve that. So this is us being able to achieve something, broaden our audience and really get to a much bigger market than we previously were able to purely by the gen AI tech.”

Other products rolled out so far include an SEO headline generator and a localisation tool suggesting changes to language and context for audiences in the US, for example by telling journalists that they might want to add a quick explanation of Remembrance Sunday.

Jacques said that “giving some context is very helpful as clearly you want there to be the minimum amount of obstacles in the consumer’s reading of something, and if it immediately feels like they’re reading something that they clearly just don’t understand or don’t have context from, we’re not going to see great engagement through it”.

Staff can also use an editorial research tool based on all of The Telegraph’s previous content to help them more easily add context or find past quotes. And they have a new AI data assistant helping them quickly get the answers to analytics questions like “how many subscriptions did we get yesterday?” or “what was engagement like in the money section of the website in the US last week?”

Jacques said that previously “you would have to get through quite a bit of comparative analysis and dashboard comparisons. This is now available at people’s fingertips quite instantly.”

Telegraph AI tips: ‘Learn through doing, be agnostic, invest in the capability’

Also potentially in the pipeline is a customer-facing search chatbot for the site based on its own archive, similar to functions rolled out this year by the Financial Times and The Washington Post.

“We have internal services that do that already and we’re just contemplating whether or not we want to extend that into the consumer-facing realm,” Jacques said.

“We’ve got a very ambitious multi-strand expansion plan for more of this next year. We’ve seen some real successes so lots of reasons to invest, and we really want to establish ourselves as a market leader in the gen AI space.”

Asked for his tips for other news publishers that may not be as far through their journey rolling out generative AI products, Jacques said: “I would say if you feel you’re being bogged down with policy type stuff, I would try and move to a model where you’re learning through doing rather than doing too much academic evaluation of whether you should.”

He added that it is best to be “quite agnostic” with the technology: “There are lots of tools out there, they change all the time, different models get released all the time which suddenly makes a use case that was unfeasible last month this month totally feasible. So you need to be quite across the technology and trying different things all the time. Hitching your flag to one vendor or another is probably a mistake in this area.”

Jacques added: “You want to invest in the capability within your organisation as much as you want to invest in the use cases.” The Telegraph has around six people dedicated to working on generative AI. The questions to ask when deciding on staffing, he noted, include “what would they be doing otherwise?” and “what are the development priorities within the organisation?”

Jacques continued: “You might find that, you know, all of a sudden you want to turn something off and spin something else up that’s new and you can do that easily… providing that you’ve got the people and the capability – the use case specifically maybe is a bit more transient.”

Hear more from Telegraph of technology Dylan Jacques about the news publisher’s generative AI rollout on Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast.

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News Corp-owned business intelligence search engine Factiva is adding generative AI summaries to its search results.

The news database, which is part of Dow Jones, has deployed Google’s Gemini technology as part of News Corp’s ongoing business partnership with the tech giant. News Corp signed a three-year partnership with Google in 2021 which included payments for content via Google News Showcase and technology sharing.

Factiva approached every one of its almost 4,000 sources for new generative AI permissions and received the go-ahead from a “significant subset” of them according to general manager Traci Mabrey.

Having generative AI summaries in the search results has added multiple new “royalty moments” to Factiva, she said, including when a publisher’s content is referenced within the summary.

Factiva is used by institutions and professionals in fields like business, finance, academia and government who buy subscriptions to access its searchable archive of news, analysis and research.

Factiva licenses content from publishers, including both paywalled and free websites, meaning they get royalties proportionate to how much their work is surfaced by users.

With the launch of the generative AI capability, responses to searches in Factiva will contain a multi-sentence summary of the question that was asked above citations for three direct sources with links back to their articles, three additional recommended searches, and then a more classic search results section with all the articles that were responsive to the question asked.

Factiva acted as ‘publisher first’ in outreach for new AI deals

Mabrey told Press Gazette Factiva has been guided by three main principles on its AI products: “being a publisher first, an arbiter for publishers and an innovator”.

The publisher has reached out and spoken to “every publication and every source” on its books asking for generative AI rights, meaning every publisher referenced in its search summaries has consented to be there.

This contrasts with the approach taken by Google itself, which summarises publishers’ work in its own AI summaries without giving them a “genuine” choice (if they want to stay in its main search results).

They include: The Associated Press, Swiss news agency AWP Finanznachrichten AG and The Washington Post as well as Factiva’s fellow News Corp properties in the UK and Australia.

Mabrey said publishers have been “very grateful and very pleased with the fact that we have come with a very transparent and very trustful approach, and I think that has been one of the rationales for us being able to get some very strong partners from around the world to come on board because we are being very candid about what we want to do with the publications, what we are going to be offering in royalty moments”.

She added that she did not believe hallucinations or inaccuracies would be a problem as they have been in some generative AI products because only trusted sources are being used.

“So we are not bringing in just unvalidated information and what we think that is able to do is that that’s able to really ensure that our cutting edge technology is built on the foundation of the trusted journalism, data and analysis that’s needed at the core to begin the process.

“What we want to ensure is that by identifying those sources and building a highly relevant and contextual semantic search, that is going to be able to preclude what we hope is going to be a significant amount, if not all, of the hallucinations, because it is a very clean dataset that is going to be delivering the generative AI results, and what we want to be able to do is continue that steady stream of high quality views and information as we go forward.”

Other AI-generated ways publishers can earn royalties at Dow Jones include through the Factiva Feed for GenAI and Dow Jones Newswires GenAI Feed, which provide enterprises and financial firms with “licensed, copyright-compliant full-text content to power custom generative AI applications” like chatbots, as well as the Risk Center product for financial crime and risk management screening, and the automated due diligence report product Dow Jones Integrity Check.

Google gave Factiva ‘privacy and security’

Factiva’s new generative AI addition has been engineered with Google‘s Gemini models on Google Cloud as an extension of the existing partnership with the tech giant.

The Google Cloud partnership initially rolled out semantic search on Factiva, meaning AI interpreted the meaning and intent of a search rather than simply matching keywords.

Of the latest addition, Mabrey said: “Why we were very pleased to partner with Google on with this is that they offered us the privacy and security that was paramount for us, given the fact that we have our publishing IP within this Google Cloud instance, we also have the publishing IP for the external publishers and media and market data entities that are part of the ecosystem.

“So having the privacy and having the security was critically important, but then also being able to have a semantic search paradigm that was built solely on relevancy and contextual search criteria was also paramount, and they were able to truly deliver that for us.”

Google Cloud’s North America president Michael Clark said in a statement: “Dow Jones’s use of Google’s Gemini models on Google Cloud to power gen AI search summaries marks a significant step towards leveraging the technology to enhance information access and analysis.

“By combining our models with the extensive Factiva content set, we’re showcasing how GenAI can be a powerful tool for growth for the media industry.”

Dow Jones owner News Corp has separately done a deal with Google’s biggest rival in the AI space, OpenAI, for the use of the publisher’s current and archived content in products like ChatGPT.

Mabrey said: “It’s a very different agreement than what we have with our IPs [information providers] for our generative AI search in Factiva, but it really does apply very similar guiding principles… We apply those same guiding principles to our own IP and to the partners that we have around the globe.”

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One of the first copyright cases to be brought by news publishers against OpenAI has been dismissed by a judge.

Left-leaning news outlets AlterNet and Raw Story objected to the use of “thousands” of pieces of their content being used by OpenAI to train ChatGPT.

They alleged that their copyrighted work was “caught in a “scrape of most of the internet” to train ChatGPT and stripped of their author, title and copyright information” and sought damages from OpenAI.

On Thursday a judge in New York granted a request by OpenAI to dismiss the complaint in its entirety.

US District Judge Colleen McMahon said: “Plaintiffs allege that ChatGPT has been trained on ‘a scrape of most of the internet’, which includes massive amounts of information from innumerable sources on almost any given subject. Plaintiffs have nowhere alleged that the information in their articles is copyrighted, nor could they do so.

“When a user inputs a question into ChatGPT, ChatGPT synthesises the relevant information in its repository into an answer. Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarised content from one of Plaintiffs’ articles seems remote.

“And while Plaintiffs provide third-party statistics indicating that an earlier version of ChatGPT generated responses containing significant amounts of plagiarised content, Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged that there is a ‘substantial risk’ that the current version of ChatGPT will generate a response plagiarising one of plaintiffs’ articles.”

The publishers, who have had the same owner since AlterNet was acquired by Raw Story Media in 2018, centred the case on the removal of the copyright management information (CMI) from their works, saying this meant ChatGPT would not have learned to communicate that information when fashioning responses to inquiries from users.

They claimed the removal of the CMI was a violation of Section 1202(b)(i) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA) and they were therefore entitled to damages.

However the judge said they did not meet the threshold of Article III standing – which in US law requires concrete injury even in the context of a statutory violation.

The publishers attempted to address this, saying “the unlawful removal of CMI from a copyrighted work is a concrete injury”.

Judge McMahon said: “Plaintiffs allege that their copyrighted works (absent CMI) were used to train an AI-software program and remain in ChatGPT’s repository of text. But Plaintiffs have not alleged any actual adverse effects stemming from this alleged DMCA violation.”

And she cited a previous case that concluded: “No concrete harm, no standing.”

The publishers also sought an injunction requiring OpenAI to remove all copies of their “copyrighted works from which author, title, copyright, and terms of use information w[ere] removed from their training sets and any other repositories”.

They argued that they are entitled to such an injunction because “whether ChatGPT has or has not already reproduced their copyrighted work without attaching the required CMI, there is a substantial risk that ChatGPT will do so in the future”.

OpenAI argued the publishers failed to “allege facts tending to show that the risk of ChatGPT reproducing Plaintiffs’ work, in whole or in part, absent the requisite CMI is ‘substantial'” and the judge agreed.

“Let us be clear about what is really at stake here,” she wrote. “The alleged injury for which Plaintiffs truly seek redress is not the exclusion of CMI from Defendants’ training sets, but rather Defendants’ use of Plaintiffs’ articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation to Plaintiffs…

“Whether or not that type of injury satisfies the injury-in-fact requirement, it is not the type of harm that has been ‘elevated’ by Section 1202(b)(i) of the DMCA… Whether there is another statute or legal theory that does elevate this type of harm remains to be seen. But that question is not before the Court today.”

Judge McMahon said she was “sceptical” about the publishers’ ability to allege a perceptible injury caused by OpenAI, but said she was “prepared to consider an amended pleading”.

“We’re confident that we can address the court’s concerns in an amended complaint,” Matt Topic, a partner at Loevy & Loevy, the firm representing Raw Story Media, told Wired.

Explaining in February why the case had been launched, Raw Story publisher Roxanne Cooper said: “Raw Story’s copyright-protected journalism is the result of significant efforts of human journalists who report the news. Rather than license that work, OpenAI taught ChatGPT to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide its use of copyright-protected material.”

The New York Times was the first news publisher to launch legal action against OpenAI, alongside its partner Microsoft, in December last year. The case has since been combined with those of eight Alden Global Capital-owned publications including The New York Daily News and is currently at the stage of the publishers searching the AI company’s training database in secure conditions.

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News organisations don’t have a “genuine choice” about whether to block Google from scraping their content for its AI services, one publisher has warned.

Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the FT and former Guardian Media Group director of public policy, argued that Google’s “social contract” with publishers – through which it provided value to the industry by sending traffic to their sites – has been broken.

This is because Google now publishes summaries of those publishers’ articles in AI Overviews at the top of many search results – and also sells data generated via its search crawler to third-party large language models (LLMs).

[Read more: Google AI Overviews breaks search giant’s grand bargain with publishers]

In September last year Google introduced Google-Extended, a control which allows website owners to block its AI chatbot Gemini (formerly Bard) and its AI development platform Vertex from scraping their content.

However Google-Extended does not stop sites from being accessed and used in Google’s AI Overviews summaries, meaning that to avoid this publishers would have to opt out of being scraped by Googlebot, which indexes for search.

Rogerson said the presence of Googlebot on “almost the vast majority of websites on the open web enables Google unparalleled access to IP published online” and added that this IP is “now being used to enable Google’s LLMs, and those of third party companies such as Meta, to respond accurately to user queries in real-time”.

In a letter to Baroness Stowell, chair of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, Rogerson said: “This leaves website owners with an unenviable choice.

“To opt-out of the Google Search crawler entirely, and become invisible to the 90%+ of the UK population that currently uses Google Search, or allow scraping to continue in ways that both extract value without compensation, and undermine nascent commercial licensing markets for the use of high quality IP to build and enable the AI models of the future.”

Rogerson’s letter was triggered by Media Minister Stephanie Peacock inaccurately stating in a Future of News inquiry hearing earlier in October that the FT “has an agreement with Google“.

Peacock said licensing approaches like these are “obviously welcome” but there is “no consistency to it. It is quite piecemeal, and there is definitely a question around making it more consistent.”

The FT has not done any deal with Google for the use of its content in LLMs and other AI products, although it has previously been a partner of the tech giant in other projects like the Google News Showcase aggregation service.

The FT has separately signed a licensing agreement with OpenAI and a “number of other agreements for innovative AI related partnerships” including a private beta test with Prorata.ai, a start-up developing technology for generative AI platforms to share revenue with publishers each time their content is used to generate an answer.

Rogerson said of the FT’s OpenAI and Prorata deals: “Both of these agreements begin to align the incentives of AI platforms and publishers in the interests of quality journalism, the reader and respect for IP.

“We strongly believe that sharing revenues between technology companies that use IP and the publishers that create it – can help develop a healthier and fairer information ecosystem that encourages accurate and authoritative journalism and rightly rewards those who produce it.”

He added that this goal of aligning incentives is “being undermined by the scraping practices of incumbent technology companies” including Google.

He said the scraping of publisher IP by Google, which uses it in its own LLMs and sells it to companies like Meta, is still agreed to because sites want to appear in the tech giant’s dominant search engine.

But he said this “means that those companies extract commercial value from the source material, without a user ever engaging with the source of that information.

“From Wikipedia to the Watford Observer, websites rely on engagement with users: engagement that is generated by the content invested in and generated by those sites. Without such engagement the ability to generate any of those revenue streams disappears. This was the social contract of the open web, that value would be shared between search and social gateways and the investors in intellectual property.”

A Google spokesperson said in response: “Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and we intend for this long-established value exchange with publishers to continue.

“With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and they’re coming back to search more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. People are using AI Overviews to discover more of the web, and we’re continuing to improve the experience to make that even easier.

“We also provide web publishers with a range of controls to indicate how much of their content is eligible to display in Search.” This includes AI Overviews.

Google claims, although it has not yet shared data on this, that clicks from AI Overviews are higher quality as people are more likely to spend more time on the site.

It says Googlebot is used in AI Overviews because AI has long been built into search and is integral to how it functions.

And it tells publishers that don’t want their content to appear in AI Overviews to use the NOSNIPPET meta tag and the DATA-NOSNIPPET attribute to limit visibility of specific pages or parts of page – similar to how they could previously control whether they appeared as featured snippets at the top of results.

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Millions of stories published by sites including The New York Times and The New York Daily News have been found in three weeks of searching OpenAI’s training dataset.

The news publishers are currently trawling through data to find instances of their copyrighted work being used to train OpenAI’s models – but they say the tech company should be forced to provide the information itself.

They are now asking for a court order requiring OpenAI to “identify and admit” which of their copyrighted content was used to train each of its large language models between GPT-1 and GPT-4o.

According to the ChatGPT creator, which objected to the request, the publishers have asked for information about almost 20 million pieces of content mentioned in the case, “effectively resulting in almost 500 million requests”.

The publishers told the court on Friday that their requests to the AI company for help with inspecting the data “would be significantly reduced if OpenAI admitted that they trained their models on all, or the vast majority, of News Plaintiffs’ copyrighted content”.

A letter to the court also stated: “While they have already found millions of News Plaintiffs’ works in the training datasets, they do not know how many more works are yet to be uncovered – information that OpenAI, as the party that chose to copy these works, should be ordered to provide.”

The New York Times was the first major news publisher to file a copyright case against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December last year.

The New York Daily News and seven sister publications, all owned by Alden Global Capital, followed suit in April and the two cases have since been combined after OpenAI and Microsoft argued they “involve nearly identical allegations relating to the same new technology”.

In the new letter, the news publishers argued that identifying which of their copyrighted work was taken and used to train the GPT models is “foundational to these cases and informs the scope” of their claims.

“But News Plaintiffs and OpenAI have a fundamental disagreement about who is responsible for identifying this information.”

The publishers said they have served numerous requests since February for information about what’s in OpenAI’s training datasets, to which the tech company replied: “OpenAI will make available for inspection, pursuant to an inspection protocol to be negotiated between the parties, the pretraining data for models used for ChatGPT that it locates after a reasonable search.”

After long-running negotiations, since last month the news publishers have been inspecting OpenAI’s training data under strict conditions, previously described by the court as a “sandbox” (meaning a highly controlled environment in which only certain applications can be run).

But the news publishers said they initially faced “severe and repeated technical issues” stopping them from being able to “effectively and efficiently” carry out the search and “ascertain the full scope of OpenAI’s infringement”.

They complained that the process is “time-consuming, burdensome, and hugely expensive” and said they had spent the equivalent of 27 days via lawyers and experts in the OpenAI sandbox but were “nowhere near done”.

The New York Times Company results published on Monday revealed it has so far spent at least $7.6m on the case against OpenAI and Microsoft.

OpenAI: Training data searches are ‘uncharted waters’

OpenAI responded within the same letter that the publishers’ complaints about the inspection have either been resolved or are being actively discussed. It blamed the issues on consultants for the publishers “overwhelming the file system with malformed searches”.

OpenAI added: “Taking a step back, everyone agrees the parties are navigating uncharted waters with training-data discovery.

“There are no precedents for such discovery, where Plaintiffs seek access to several hundred terabytes of unstructured textual data. OpenAI cannot easily identify the specific content that Plaintiffs are interested in, so it did exactly what Rule 34 allows: it invited Plaintiffs to inspect the data as it is kept in the ordinary course. There is no ‘sandbox’. Rather, because the data is far too voluminous to produce, OpenAI built the hardware and software that Plaintiffs need to inspect.

“Specifically, OpenAI organised hundreds of terabytes of training data in an object-storage file system for Plaintiffs’ exclusive use; it built an enterprise-grade virtual machine with the computing power to access, search, and analyse the datasets; it installed hundreds of software tools and tens of gigabytes of Plaintiffs’ data upon their request; and it managed the necessary firewalls and secure virtual private network to support the inspection.”

OpenAI said it would continue to help the publishers overcome technical challenges provided they “engage in good faith” but added: “Unfortunately, this has not always been the case,” accusing them of delaying the process for months and submitting “hundreds of irrelevant requests”.

Representatives for the Authors Guild and progressive newsbrand Raw Story Media have also viewed the OpenAI training data for their own cases.

OpenAI previously asked a judge to force The New York Times to hand over its journalists’ confidential notes, a move the publisher warned would have “serious negative and far-reaching consequences” and was ultimately denied in September.

The post ‘Millions’ of NYT and NY Daily News stories taken by OpenAI for training data appeared first on Press Gazette.

A report from Enders Analysis has argued that generative artificial intelligence “will not alter the fundamental commercial reality for the news” as the shift online did previously.

The research firm cautioned publishers to be “realistic” about the productivity and revenue gains possible from AI, but added that ignoring AI would be “a mistake”.

The report found there have been some valuable uses for AI in the newsroom — but argued that there may not be an “immediate, killer news use case to raise revenues”.

Worthwhile use cases raised by the analysts included creating audio editions of articles and translating content into foreign languages, although they noted that “translation is not the same as localisation, so such formats won’t mean game-changing audience expansions”.

[Read more: How The Economist is using AI to extend its global reach]

AI can also help to create “more sophisticated metadata for archival material”, they wrote, in turn making it easier for journalists and readers to access a publisher’s back catalogue. This could have revenue implications for local publishers in particular, they said, “where some historical material has barely been digitised”.

‘The opportunity is real, even if… AI in itself won’t give a competitive edge’

In general however the Enders report suggested the amount of use publishers could get out of generative AI depended on their position in the market.

News agencies like PA Media or Reuters, for example, already integrate non-generative AI into their systems with products like RADAR, which reformat structured data sets into news stories.

“The marginal benefits of moving to a generative AI-based system are going to be more limited for an organisation that has already automated a large degree of newsgathering and production,” said the report.

Systems that rely on large language machines — i.e. generative AI — “often require much more oversight by journalists” because of their well-recorded tendency to invent information.

“The output of pre-LLM systems might be more rote, but they are also currently far more reliable, and that is what a news agency needs to be,” Enders said.

At local and regional publishers, on the other hand, the flexibility of generative AI can be helpful because it allows small, less well-resourced newsrooms to spend less time on “more kinds of tasks”.

The report cited as an example Newsquest, which has been hiring “AI-assisted” reporters who can rapidly re-format press releases — freeing up other reporters to do more reporting in the community — and has developed a bot “that can generate story leads through automated FOI requests and identification of newsworthy responses”.

The two main AI use cases the Enders analysts highlighted at national newsbrands were data journalism and story ideation. But they cautioned that given the wide availability of generative AI tools “what will give an organisation an original edge here may be acquiring quality datasets to investigate”.

The Financial Times, they said, sets an example here by using LLMs “to classify information in large datasets, but then use traditional rules based AI to perform analysis on that data once it is classified—this makes hallucination less likely to creep in”.

For now, Enders saw limited room for generative AI in video news content creation, reasoning that “any sensible efficiencies are in editing, not generation, which has a long way to go before it is cost-effective or reliable”.

“Publishers must be realistic about the scale of efficiencies and revenue generation opportunities, and size investments accordingly,” the report said in its summary.

“The opportunity is real, even if broad, democratised access to tools means that AI in itself won’t give a competitive edge.”

The investment necessary may be mitigated through “some pooling of resources”, the analysts recommended.

“The costs involved in some of this development could be shared if UK publishers see this as a way of collectively combating challenges to the industry as a whole.”

Are AI chatbots for news publishers worth it?

Chatbots trained on publisher content have been the main consumer-facing generative AI product news publishers have experimented with. Enders described this as a bid “to be the destination, the recognisable source and brand of the content they supply” amid ongoing attempts by big tech to build link-free, generative AI-powered search engines.

The firm said that “concrete experimentation” had been slower with chatbots than back-end tinkering, “in part due to concerns about reader reception of ‘AI’ things.

“Some UK publishers feel there is little early mover advantage to the reader-facing side, meaning that there has been a bit of stalemate.”

Consumer demand for such chatbots “is so far unclear and the bar for rollout is high”, the report said, but they could lay the foundations for “other more effective interfaces, like improved search/website functionality—areas where some online news providers have been stalling…

“Improvements here are more modest but effective: like the FT’s new feature allowing readers to highlight text and find articles semantically related to it, moving beyond offering only high-level related articles.”

The post How publishers use AI to boost productivity: From audio editions to exploiting archives appeared first on Press Gazette.

News publishers are increasingly deciding to sign deals with AI companies over the use of their content despite early doubts and a high-profile legal case from The New York Times.

The deals commonly include the use of news publishers’ content as reference points for user queries in tools like ChatGPT (with citation back to their websites currently promised) as well as giving them the use of the AI tech to build their own products.

This page will be updated when new deals are struck or legal actions are launched relating to news publishers and AI companies (latest: Meta strikes an AI deal with Reuters while News Corp subsidiaries sue Perplexity).

OpenAI is reportedly offering news organisations between $1m and $5m per year to license their copyrighted content to train its models – although News Corp’s deal is reportedly worth more than $250m over five years.

Meanwhile Apple has reportedly been exploring AI deals with the likes of Conde Nast, NBC News and People and Daily Beast owner IAC to license their content archives, but nothing has yet been made public.

Scroll down or here are the quick links:

• Latest lawsuits: including eight Alden US dailies
• Latest deals: including Hearst, Conde Nast, The Atlantic, Vox Media, News Corp, Dotdash Meredith

Plenty of other news organisations are understood to be in negotiations with OpenAI while some, including the publisher of Mail Online, have suggested they are seriously considering their options legally.

But not all publishers want deals: Reach chief executive Jim Mullen told investors on 5 March that the UK’s largest commercial publisher is not in any “active discussions” with AI companies and suggested other publishers should hold off on deals to allow the industry to come at the issue with a position of solidarity.

He said: “We would prefer that we don’t get into a situation where we did with the referrers ten years ago and gave them access and we became hooked on this referral traffic and we would like it to be more structured. We produce content, which is really valuable, and we would like to license or agree how they use our base intelligence to actually inform the AI and the open markets. The challenge we have as an industry is that we need to be unified.

“I used to be the chairman of the NMA and if we stay together and work with it, then that’s a really strong position that we have, particularly with the Government to help us get to there. So I’m using this as a bit of a campaign, [it] only takes one publisher to break away and start doing deals and then it sort of disintegrates.”

Press Gazette analysis in February found that more than four in ten of the 100 biggest English-language news websites have decided not to block AI bots from the likes of OpenAI and Google.

If you feel there is something missing that should be included, or you want to alert us to a new development, please contact charlotte.tobitt@pressgazette.co.uk.

Suing

News Corp (versus Perplexity)

The News Corp subsidiaries that publish the Wall Street Journal and New York Post have filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against AI upstart Perplexity, which they accuse of “massive freeriding”.

The publisher is seeking massive damages and the removal of its content from Perplexity’s web index and wants its case heard at a jury trial.

News Corp has separately signed a deal with OpenAI (see below for more information). It is the first to sue Perplexity though other publishers including The New York Times have sent the AI company cease and desist letters.

Read the full story here.

Mumsnet

UK parenting forum and publisher Mumsnet has launched legal action via an initial letter against OpenAI over the scraping of its site and its more than six billion words – “presumably” for the training of large language model ChatGPT.

Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts told users: “Such scraping without permission is an explicit breach of our terms of use, which clearly state that no part of the site may be distributed, scraped or copied for any purpose without our express approval. So we approached Open AI and suggested they might like to licence our content.”

In particular, she said, Mumsnet’s content would be valuable because it could help to counter the misogyny “baked in” to many AI models.

But, she continued: “Their response was that they were more interested in datasets that are not easily accessible online.”

Roberts said what OpenAI differs from Google’s scraping of the web for search purposes because there is a “clear value exchange in allowing Google to access that data, namely the resulting search traffic… The LLMs are building models like ChatGPT to provide the answers to any and all prospective questions that will mean we’ll no longer need to go elsewhere for solutions. And they’re building those models with scraped content from the websites they are poised to replace.”

Roberts continued: “At Mumsnet we’re in a stronger position than most because much of our traffic comes to us direct and though it’s a piece of cake for an LLM to spit out a Mumsnet-style answer to a parenting question I doubt they’ll ever be as funny about parking wars or as honest about relationships and they’ll certainly never provide the emotional support that sees around a thousand women a year helped to leave abusive partners by other Mumsnet users.

“But if these trillion-dollar giants are simply allowed to pillage content from online publishers – and get away with it – they will destroy many of them.”

Roberts acknowledged it is “not an easy task” to go up against a big tech company like OpenAI but said “this is too important an issue to simply roll over”.

Responses from users on the forum contained a lot of “well done” and “good luck”.

The Center for Investigative Reporting

Non-profit news organisation The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones (after a merger this year) and Reveal, is suing OpenAI and its largest shareholder Microsoft, it announced on 28 June.

It said the companies had used its content “without permission or offering compensation” and accused them of “exploitative practices” in a lawsuit filed in New York.

Chief executive Monika Bauerlein said: “OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material.

“This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright. The work of journalists, at CIR and everywhere, is valuable, and OpenAI and Microsoft know it.”

She added: “For-profit corporations like OpenAI and Microsoft can’t simply treat the work of nonprofit and independent publishers as free raw material for their products.

“If this practice isn’t stopped, the public’s access to truthful information will be limited to AI-generated summaries of a disappearing news landscape.”

Eight Alden Global Capital daily newspapers

Eight daily newspapers in the US owned by Alden Global Capital are suing OpenAI and Microsoft, it was revealed on 30 April.

The newspapers involved in the lawsuit are: the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Sun-Sentinel in Florida, the Mercury News in San Jose, the Denver Post, the Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The lawsuit says the newspapers want recognition that they have a legal right over their content and compensation for the use of it in the training of AI tools so far.

Frank Pine, executive editor of Media News Group and Tribune Publishing Newspapers, the Alden subsidiaries that own the newspapers concerned, said: “We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense.

“They pay their engineers and programmers, they pay for servers and processors, they pay for electricity, and they definitely get paid from their astronomical valuations, but they don’t want to pay for the content without which they would have no product at all. That’s not fair use, and it’s not fair. It needs to stop.

“The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news. These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing purloined content and delivering it to their users.

“Even worse, when they’re not delivering the actual verbatim reporting of our hard-working journalists, they misattribute bogus information to our news publications, damaging our credibility. We employ professional journalists who adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and fairness. They are real people who go out into the world to conduct first-hand interviews and engage in actual investigations to produce our journalism.

“Their work is vetted and checked by professional editors. The Mercury News has never recommended injecting disinfectants to treat COVID, and the Denver Post did not publish research that shows smoking cures asthma. These and other ChatGPT hallucinations are documented in our legal filings.”

The Intercept, Raw Story and Alter Net

Three US progressive news and politics digital outlets filed lawsuits against OpenAI on Wednesday 28 February.

The Intercept, Raw Story and Alter Net objected to the use of their articles to train ChatGPT. The Intercept also sued Microsoft, which has partnered with OpenAI to create a Bing chatbot.

Raw Story publisher Roxanne Cooper said: “Raw Story’s copyright-protected journalism is the result of significant efforts of human journalists who report the news. Rather than license that work, OpenAI taught ChatGPT to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide its use of copyright-protected material.”

CEO and founder John Byrne added: “It is time that news organisations fight back against Big Tech’s continued attempts to monetise other people’s work.”

The New York Times

The most high-profile case against OpenAI and Microsoft from a news publisher so far, The New York Times made a surprise announcement in the days after Christmas that it would seek damages, restitution and costs as well as the destruction of all large language models (LLMs) trained on its content.

OpenAI and NYT had been in negotiations for nine months but the news organisation felt no resolution was forthcoming and decided instead to share its concerns over the use of its intellectual property publicly. The success of the lawsuit will depend on the US court’s interpretation of “fair use” in copyright law – assuming the companies don’t find their way to a settlement first.

OpenAI previously said a “high-value partnership around real-time display with attribution in ChatGPT” was on the cards with the NYT before the news organisation surprised it by launching the lawsuit.

The NYT said the two tech companies, which have a partnership centred around ChatGPT and Bing, have “reaped substantial savings by taking and using – at no cost” its content to create their models without paying for a licence. It added that the use of its content in chatbots “threatens to divert readers, including current and potential subscribers, away from The Times, thereby reducing the subscription, advertising, licensing, and affiliate revenues that fund The Times’s ability to continue producing its current level of groundbreaking journalism”.

In its response, filed on Monday 26 February, OpenAI argued: “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product” to substitute for a NYT subscription. “Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

OpenAI accused the NYT of paying someone to hack its products and taking “tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results” in which verbatim paragraphs from articles were spat out by ChatGPT. “They were able to do so only by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” it said.

“And even then, they had to feed the tool portions of the very articles they sought to elicit verbatim passages of, virtually all of which already appear on multiple public websites. Normal people do not use OpenAI’s products in this way.”

Getty Images

Getty Images began legal proceedings against Stability AI in the UK in January 2023, claiming that the AI image company “unlawfully copied and processed” millions of its copyrighted images without a licence through its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.

In December, the High Court in London ruled that Getty’s case could go to trial after Stability AI failed to persuade a judge that two aspects of the claim – relating to training and development as well as copyright – should be struck out.

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith said Getty’s claim has a “real prospect of success” in relation to Stable Diffusion’s “image-to-image feature” which the photo agency claimed allows users to make “essentially identical copies of copyright works”.

Who’s signed news AI deals?

Reuters

Reuters, which has previously said it had struck a number of deals with unspecified AI companies and then signed up as a publisher partner for Microsoft’s new AI companion Copilot, has become the first news publisher to sign an AI deal with Meta.

The deal allows Meta’s AI chatbot to use real-time Reuters content to answer questions from users about news and current events, it announced on 25 October, although it will begin only in the US.

The chatbot, which appears with the search and messaging features on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger, will provide summaries and link out to Reuters which will be compensated when its work is used in this way.

Reuters already had a fact-checking partnership with the Facebook owner.

A Reuters spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Reuters has partnered with tech providers to license our trusted, fact-based news content to power their AI platforms. The terms of these deals remain confidential.”

A Meta spokesperson told Axios: “We’re always iterating and working to improve our products, and through Meta’s partnership with Reuters, Meta AI can respond to news-related questions with summaries and links to Reuters content.

“While most people use Meta AI for creative tasks, deep dives on new topics or how-to assistance, this partnership will help ensure a more useful experience for those seeking information on current events.”

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism

OpenAI and Microsoft are distributing $10m to The Lenfest Institute for Journalism to provide five US newsrooms with a grant to each hire a fellow to work on AI projects for two years.

The newsrooms benefiting from the initial round of funding are: Chicago Public Media, Newsday in Long Island, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times. Three further news organisations will receive funding in a second round.

The projects from the fellows should “focus largely on improving business sustainability and implementing AI technologies within their organisations”, Lenfest said.

OpenAI and Microsoft will also allow the publications to use their tools to experiment and develop tools to help with their local news output.

Tom Rubin, chief of intellectual property and content at OpenAI, said: “While nothing will replace the central role of reporters, we believe that AI technology can help in the research, investigation, distribution, and monetisation of important journalism.

“We’re deeply invested in supporting smaller, independent publishers through initiatives like The Lenfest Institute AI Collaborative and Fellowship, ensuring they have access to the same cutting-edge tools and opportunities as larger organizations.”

Hearst

Newspaper and magazine giant Hearst has agreed a “content partnership” with OpenAI in the US, it announced on 8 October.

Hearst said OpenAI products including ChatGPT will incorporate content from its US brands including Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Runner’s World and Women’s Health – more than 20 magazine titles and 40 newspapers in total. It does not include Hearst’s content in other countries like the UK.

Hearst said its content will “feature appropriate citations and direct links, providing transparency and easy access to the original Hearst sources” from ChatGPT.

Hearst Newspapers president Jeff Johnson said: “As generative AI matures, it’s critical that journalism created by professional journalists be at the heart of all AI products.

“This agreement allows the trustworthy and curated content created by Hearst Newspapers’ award-winning journalists to be part of OpenAI’s products like ChatGPT — creating more timely and relevant results.”

Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella added: “Our partnership with OpenAI will help us evolve the future of magazine content. This collaboration ensures that our high-quality writing and expertise, cultural and historical context and attribution and credibility are promoted as OpenAI’s products evolve.”

And OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said the use of Hearst content “elevates our ability to provide engaging, reliable information to our users”.

FT, Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Mags, USA Today Network

The FT, Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Mags and USA Today Network were named as publisher partners for Microsoft’s new AI “companion”, Copilot, at the start of October.

Those announced were existing partners of Microsoft’s MSN news licensing service but Press Gazette understands these are new deals.

Microsoft said Copilot Daily can give a summary of the news and weather using an AI Copilot Voice.

“It’s an antidote for that familiar feeling of information overload. Clean, simple and easy to digest. Copilot Daily will only pull from authorised content sources. We are working with partners such as Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network and Financial Times, and plan to add more sources over time. We’ll also add additional personalisation and controls in Copilot Daily over time.”

Conde Nast

Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair and GQ publisher Conde Nast has become the latest publisher to sign a “multi-year partnership” relating to the display of its content in OpenAI products, it announced on 20 August.

Conde Nast chief executive Roger Lynch has been outspoken about the risks generative AI poses to news businesses, telling US Congress “many” media companies could go out of business by the time any litigation passes through the courts and that “immediate action” should be taken through a clarification that content creators should be compensated for the use of their work in training.

In a memo to staff he has now said the OpenAI deal helps to make up for revenue being lost through declining search traffic.

He wrote: “It’s crucial that we meet audiences where they are and embrace new technologies while also ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property. This is exactly what we have found with OpenAI.

“Over the last decade, news and digital media have faced steep challenges as many technology companies eroded publishers’ ability to monetize content, most recently with traditional search. Our partnership with OpenAI begins to make up for some of that revenue, allowing us to continue to protect and invest in our journalism and creative endeavours.”

The deal will allow OpenAI to display content from Conde Nast brands in its products, including ChatGPT and its SearchGPT AI-driven search engine prototype.

OpenAI explained what this means in a blog post: “With the introduction of our SearchGPT prototype, we’re testing new search features that make finding information and reliable content sources faster and more intuitive. We’re combining our conversational models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources. SearchGPT offers direct links to news stories, enabling users to easily explore more in-depth content directly from the source.

“We plan to integrate the best of these features directly into ChatGPT in the future.

“We’re collaborating with our news partners to collect feedback and insights on the design and performance of SearchGPT, ensuring that these integrations enhance user experiences and inform future updates to ChatGPT.”

Lynch praised OpenAI for being “transparent and willing to productively work with publishers like us so that the public can receive reliable information and news through their platforms”.

He continued: “This partnership recognises that the exceptional content produced by Condé Nast and our many titles cannot be replaced, and is a step toward making sure our technology-enabled future is one that is created responsibly.

“It is just the beginning and we will continue what we started in Washington earlier this year – the fight for fair deals and partnerships across the industry until all entities developing and deploying artificial intelligence take seriously, as OpenAI has, the rights of publishers.”

Financial Times, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, Fortune

Financial Times, Axel Springer, The Atlantic and Fortune (as well as Universal Music Group) have agreed to license their content to generative AI start-up Prorata.ai.

Prorata says it has a proprietary algorithm that can work out how much of various publishers’ content is used in an answer and share revenue accordingly. When it launches its own chatbot this autumn, it says, it will share 50% of the revenue from subscriptions with content creators.

Read our full story about Prorata’s plan here.

Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress owner Automattic

Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress.com owner Automattic have become the first publishers to sign up to a revenue-sharing deal launched by AI search chatbot Perplexity.

When Perplexity introduces advertising via sponsored related questions within the next few months, signed-up publishers will be able to share the revenue generated by interactions where their content is referenced.

The programme also gives them access to analytics platform Scalepost.ai to see which of their articles show up frequently in Perplexity answers that get monetised, access to Perplexity tech to create their own custom answer engines for their websites, and one year of Perplexity Enterprise Pro for all employees for a year.

Read our full story about the revenue-sharing programme, and Perplexity’s view on its relationship with publishers, here.

Time

Time has signed a “multi-year content deal and strategic partnership” with OpenAI, it revealed on 27 June.

The deal will give the ChatGPT creator access to Time’s 101-year-old archive and its current reporting to give up-to-date answers to users (with a citation and a link back to the website).

Time will also have access to OpenAI tech to build its own products and provide feedback to the tech company on the delivery of journalism through its tools.

Time chief operating officer Mark Howard said: “Throughout our 101-year history, Time has embraced innovation to ensure that the delivery of our trusted journalism evolves alongside technology. This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing Time’s journalism to audiences globally.”

OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said the deal supports “reputable journalism by providing proper attribution to original sources.”

Vox Media

Vox Media has signed a “strategic content and product partnership” with OpenAI that means content – including archive journalism – from its brands including Vox, The Verge, Eater, New York Magazine, The Cut, Vulture and SB Nation will be surfaced on ChatGPT and also that it can use OpenAI’s tech to develop audience-facing and internal products.

The publisher said it will use OpenAI tech to create stronger creative optimisation and audience segment targeting on its first-party data platform Forte, which is used across all Vox Media sites and on its ad marketplace Concert.

It will also use OpenAI tools to match people with the right products on its search-based affiliate commerce tool The Strategist Gift Scout.

Vox Media co-founder, chair and chief executive Jim Bankoff said: “This agreement aligns with our goals of leveraging generative AI to innovate for our audiences and customers, protect and grow the value of our work and intellectual property, and boost productivity and discoverability to elevate the talent and creativity of our exceptional journalists and creators.”

The Atlantic

The Atlantic also announced on 29 May it has signed a “strategic content and product partnership” with OpenAI meaning its articles will be discoverable within ChatGPT and the AI giant’s other products, with these results providing attribution and links to its website.

The partnership also means The Atlantic “will help to shape how news is surfaced and presented in future real-time discovery products”.

The companies are also collaborating on product and tech, with The Atlantic’s product team given “privileged access” to OpenAI tech to give feedback and help shape the future of news in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.

The Atlantic said it is currently developing an experimental microsite called Atlantic Labs “to figure out how AI can help in the development of new products and features to better serve its journalism and readers”. It will pilot OpenAI’s and other emerging tech in this work.

Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, said: “We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future.”

He added that the partnership will mean The Atlantic’s reporting is “more discoverable” to OpenAI’s millions of users and give the publisher “a voice in shaping how news is surfaced on their platforms”.

OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said: “Enabling access to The Atlantic’s reporting in our products will allow users to more deeply interact with thought-provoking news. We are dedicated to supporting high-quality journalism and the publishing ecosystem.”

[Read more: What’s next for The Atlantic after reaching profitability and 1m subscribers]

WAN-IFRA

The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has announced a partnership with OpenAI for a programme, Newsroom AI Catalyst, designed to “help newsrooms fast-track their AI adoption and implementation to bring efficiencies and create quality content”.

The project will work with 128 newsrooms in Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and South Asia providing expert guidance with funding and technical assistance from OpenAI.

Each team will receive three months of learning modules, hands-on workshops, a mini hackathon, and a showcase. They will go back to their newsrooms with a clear plan on how to roll out AI.

Vincent Peyregne, chief executive of WAN-IFRA, said: “News enterprises across the globe have come under pressure from declining advertising and print subscription revenues. The adversity confronting news leaves communities without access to a shared basis of facts and shared values and puts democracy itself at risk.

“AI technologies can positively influence news organisations’ sustainability as long as you quickly grasp the stakes and understand how to turn it to your advantage.”

He added that OpenAI’s support will “help the newsrooms through the adoption of AI technologies to provide high-quality journalism that is the cornerstone of the news business”.

OpenAI’s chief of intellectual property and content Tom Rubin said the programme is “designed to turbocharge the capabilities of 128 newsrooms” and he wants to help “cultivate a healthy, sustainable ecosystem that promotes quality journalism”.

News Corp

News Corp has signed a deal that includes the use of content from many of its major newsbrands in the UK, US and Australia in OpenAI’s large language models, it was announced on 22 May.

The partnership covers content from The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily, FN, and the New York Post in the US; The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun in the UK; and The Australian, news.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail, The Advertiser, and the Herald Sun in Australia.

The Wall Street Journal put a value on the deal of more than $250m over five years.

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson described OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his team as “principled partners… who understand the commercial and social significance of journalists and journalism.

“This landmark accord is not an end, but the beginning of a beautiful friendship in which we are jointly committed to creating and delivering insight and integrity instantaneously.”

Dotdash Meredith

Dotdash Meredith, which publishes more than 40 titles including People, Instyle and Investopedia, on 7 May signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI that will see its content and links surfaced in ChatGPT responses.

OpenAI will incorporate real-time information from Dotdash sites into ChatGPT’s responses to queries and will use the publisher’s content to train its large language models. Dotdash meanwhile will receive assistance from OpenAI in developing both consumer-facing AI products and its AI-powered contextual advertising tool, D/Cipher.

B2B giant Informa

Business information giant Informa announced a non-exclusive Partnership and Data Access Agreement with Microsoft (the main backer of OpenAI) in a trading update on 8 May. There has been an initial fee of $10m+ and then three more recurring annual payments.

Informa said the deal covers:

“Improved Productivity: Explore how AI can enable more effective ways of working at Informa, streamlining operations, utilising Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enable Colleagues to work more efficiently, and enhancing the capabilities of Informa’s existing AI and data platforms (IIRIS);

“Citation Engine: Collaborate to further develop automated citation referencing, using the latest technology to improve speed and accuracy;

“Specialist Expert Agent: Explore the development of specialised expert agents for customers such as authors and librarians to assist with research, understanding and new knowledge creation/sharing;

“Data Access: Provide non-exclusive access to Advanced Learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems.”

Informa said the deal “protects intellectual property rights, including limits on verbatim text extracts and alignment on the importance of detailed citation references”.

Axel Springer (again)

Following its deal with OpenAI (see below) Axel Springer has announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft covering AI, advertising, content and cloud computing.

On AI, they will partner to develop new AI-driven chat experiences to inform users using Axel Springer’s journalism.

They added: “In addition, Axel Springer will leverage Microsoft Advertising’s Chat Ads API for generative AI monetisation.”

Their existing adtech collaboration will be expanded from Europe into the US to encompass Politico, while users of Microsoft’s aggregator Start-MSN will have access to more premium content from Axel Springer’s brands. Finally the publisher will migrate its SAP solutions to Microsoft Azure.

Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Dopfner said: “In this new era of AI, partnerships are critical to preserving and promoting independent journalism while ensuring a thriving media landscape.

“We’re optimistic about the future of journalism and the opportunities we can unlock through this expanded partnership with Microsoft.”

Microsoft chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella added: “Our expanded partnership with Axel Springer brings together their leadership in digital publishing with the full power of the Microsoft Cloud — including our ad solutions — to build innovative AI-driven experiences and create new opportunity for advertisers and users.”

Financial Times

On 29 April the Financial Times became the first major UK newsbrand to announce a deal with OpenAI.

The partnership involves up-to-date news content and journalism from the FT archive, meaning it is likely to assist with both real-time queries on ChatGPT and its continued training.

FT Group chief executive John Ridding said: “This is an important agreement in a number of respects.

“It recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI… Apart from the benefits to the FT, there are broader implications for the industry. It’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material.”

Le Monde and Prisa Media

OpenAI announced on 13 March it had signed deals with French newsbrand Le Monde and Spanish publisher Prisa Media, which publishes El País, Cinco Días, As and El Huffpost.

The deals will mean ChatGPT users can surface recent content from both publishers through “select summaries with attribution and enhanced links to the original articles”, while their content will be allowed to contribute to training OpenAI’s models.

Le Monde chief executive Louis Dreyfus said: “At the moment we are celebrating the 80th anniversary of Le Monde, this partnership with OpenAI allows us to expand our reach and uphold our commitment to providing accurate, verified, balanced news stories at scale.

“Collaborating with OpenAI ensures that our authoritative content can be accessed and appreciated by a broader, more diverse audience… Our partnership with OpenAI is a strategic move to ensure the dissemination of reliable information to AI users, safeguarding our journalistic integrity and revenue streams in the process.”

Carlos Nuñez, chairman and chief executive of Prisa Media added: “Joining forces with OpenAI opens new avenues for us to engage with our audience. Leveraging ChatGPT’s capabilities allows us to present our in-depth, quality journalism in novel ways, reaching individuals who seek credible and independent content.

“This is a definite step towards the future of news, where technology and human expertise merge to enrich the reader’s experience.”

Reuters

Thomson Reuters chief executive Steve Hasker told the Financial Times that the company had struck “a number” of deals with AI companies looking to use Reuters news content to train their models but he did not give any further details about who was involved in the deals or for how much.

He did say that “there appears to be a market price evolving”, adding: “These models need to be fed. And they may as well be fed by the highest-quality, independent fact-based content. We have done a number of those deals, and we’re exploring the potential there.”

However away from the Reuters news part of the business Thomson Reuters is suing Ross Intelligence for allegedly unlawfully copying content from its legal research platform Westlaw to train a rival AI-powered intelligence platform.

Unknown independent publishers

A handful of unnamed independent publishers are taking part in a private programme with Google, according to Adweek, which will see them paid a five-figure annual sum to take part in a trial of a new AI platform.

The publishers are reportedly expected to produce a certain number of stories for a year and provide analytics and feedback in exchange.

Reddit

Social media platform Reddit has signed a deal allowing its content to be used by Google in the training of its AI tools. Reuters reported that the deal is worth around $60m per year.

Although not a news organisation, the Reddit deal is still a content licensing deal. There is also likely to be news media content copied within Reddit posts from users on the platform which could therefore fall within the remit of the deal.

Semafor (sort of)

Ben Smith and Justin B Smith’s start-up Semafor has secured “substantial” Microsoft sponsorship for an AI-driven news feed, although this was not built by the tech giant but by the newsroom itself.

The deal, announced in February, will see Microsoft help Semafor refine the tool and makes the digital outlet one of the first newsrooms to heavily involve ChatGPT in their workflow.

Although not a content deal as such, the agreement indicates a level of co-operation rather than acrimony.

Axel Springer

In December Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt owner Axel Springer agreed a partnership with OpenAI that would see its content summarised within ChatGPT around the world, including otherwise paywalled content, with links and attribution. Axel Springer’s content is permitted to be used to train OpenAI products going forward.

Axel Springer can also use OpenAI technology to continue building its own AI products.

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner said: “We are excited to have shaped this global partnership between Axel Springer and OpenAI – the first of its kind. We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level.”

American Journalism Project

In July 2023 OpenAI committed $5m to the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organisation working to support and rebuild local news organisations, to support the expansion of its work. It also pledged up to $5m in OpenAI API credits to help participating organisations try out emerging AI technologies.

American Journalism Project chief executive Sarabeth Berman said: “To ensure local journalism remains an essential pillar of our democracy, we need to be smart about the potential powers and pitfalls of new technology. In these early days of generative AI, we have the opportunity to ensure that local news organisations, and their communities, are involved in shaping its implications. With this partnership, we aim to promote ways for AI to enhance—rather than imperil—journalism.”

Associated Press

OpenAI and Associated Press signed a deal in July 2023 that allows the AI company to license the news agency’s content archive going back to 1985 for training purposes.

The companies said they are also looking at “potential use cases for generative AI in news products and services” but did not share specifics.

Kristin Heitmann, AP senior vice president and chief revenue officer, said: “We are pleased that OpenAI recognises that fact-based, nonpartisan news content is essential to this evolving technology, and that they respect the value of our intellectual property. AP firmly supports a framework that will ensure intellectual property is protected and content creators are fairly compensated for their work.”

One professor told AP the deal could be particularly beneficial to OpenAI because it would mean they can still use a wealth of trusted content even if they lose other lawsuits and are forced to delete training data as a result, from The New York Times for example.

Shutterstock

In July 2023 Shutterstock expanded its partnership with OpenAI with a six-year agreement allowing access to a wealth of training data including images, videos, music and associated metadata.

For its part, Shutterstock gets “priority access” to new OpenAI technology and can offer DALL-E’s text-to-image capabilities directly within its platform.

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Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said in a letter to the News Media Association that his government “recognises the basic principle” that publishers should seek compensation for the use of their content by artificial intelligence companies.

Marking the start of the NMA‘s annual “Journalism Matters” week, the Labour leader said both AI and the media were “central” to the government’s growth goals and he hoped to “rebalance” the relationship between platforms and publishers using the Digital Markets and Consumers Act.

He said: “Both artificial intelligence and the creative industries – which includes news and media – are central to this government’s driving mission on economic growth.

“To strike balance in our industrial policy, we are working closely with both sectors. We recognise the basic principle that publishers should have control over and seek payment for their work, including when thinking about the role of AI.

“Not only is it essential for a vibrant media landscape, in which the sector’s provision of trustworthy information is more vital than ever.”

Starmer’s comments come two weeks after he told an investment summit the UK “needs to run towards” AI, which he described as “a game changer that has massive potential on productivity, and on driving our economy”.

And they come the day after The Observer reported that publishers including the BBC and Mumsnet have voiced worry over a Labour plan to allow AI companies to scrape pages on the internet for content by default, which would mean websites have to actively opt out to prevent their property being digested into AI large language models. (The head of the NMA told The Observer the plans would be “a hammer blow to the creative industries”.)

The prime minister also wrote that journalists should not “ever suffer intimidation”, including from “powerful people using SLAPPs [vexatious lawsuits] to intimidate journalists away from their pursuit of the public interest.

“Such behaviour is intolerable and we will tackle the use of SLAPPs to protect investigative journalism, alongside access to justice. “

After initially promising action on SLAPPs (by Russian oligarchs specifically) during the general election, Labour has since delayed making specific proposals on the issue. A private members’ bill about SLAPPs that was making its way through Parliament was dropped when the election was called, although a new private members’ bill put forward by Conservative Gregory Stafford is on its second reading at time of writing.

Also marking the commencement of Journalism Matters week, NMA chief executive Owen Meredith wrote: “We have the opportunity to harness the potential of AI – but we must do so in a way that supports the sustainability of journalism by upholding our gold standard intellectual property and copyright laws, which are a powerful driver of revenue and growth across many industries.

“The news media industry is not against generative AI, but it cannot be allowed to dismantle existing industries that are so important culturally and financially to the UK.”

Meredith called for the government to “divert a greater proportion of its advertising spend from Big Tech to local media” and to have the forthcoming Digital Market Unit prioritise designating “Google’s ad tech services, Meta’s Facebook and both Google and Apple’s mobile ecosystems” as having strategic market status.

[Read more: Digital Markets Bill passed paving way for publisher ‘level playing field’ with big tech]

Keir Starmer’s letter to the News Media Association in full:

“Journalism is the lifeblood of democracy. Journalists are guardians of democratic values. These simple facts are so woven into the fabric of our society, that we often take them for granted. This year I fought tooth and nail for the honour of serving our country as Prime Minister. And at every step of the way, I was robustly held to account by determined, incisive and irrepressible members of the fourth estate. Neither myself or the now Leader of the Opposition complained about this. Neither of us turned our partisan supporters against the media. We went about our business, just as all our predecessors have, accepting that this is democracy in action. It was ordinary and unremarkable.

“And yet this is not a given. All around the world journalist put themselves at risk in defence of those values. Journalists such as the Ukrainian Victoria Roshchyna, who brought us the horrific story of Mariupol – now dead in Russian custody. Or the hundreds of journalists killed reporting the unimaginable suffering in Gaza. Or the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue taking cover during the attempted assassination of President Trump, still broadcasting while lying face down on the ground behind his car. An extraordinary image that brought home both the risks and the purpose of journalism. That, through the bravery of journalists, the world sees what it needs to see.

“There are over 900 local and national news titles in the UK. For all the prophecies of doom about the future of news, that represents an extraordinary strength. The British news industry reaches over eighty percent of the population.

“However, this vitality should not blind us to the challenges. And, while thankfully there is no direct threat to press freedoms in our country, we must remain vigilant that the growing power of digital technology does not begin to chip away at them. Particularly as artificial intelligence begins to transform our economy and way of life.

“Both artificial intelligence and the creative industries – which includes news and media – are central to this government’s driving mission on economic growth. To strike balance in our industrial policy, we are working closely with both sectors. We recognise the basic principle that publishers should have control over and seek payment for their work, including when thinking about the role of AI. Not only is it essential for a vibrant media landscape, in which the sector’s provision of trustworthy information is more vital than ever. It is also relevant to our ongoing work to roll out the Digital Markets and Consumers Act as swiftly as possible. This landmark legislation will help rebalance the relationship between platforms and those, such as publishers, who rely on them.

“We also stand with journalists who endure threats just for doing their job. Just because journalists are brave, does not mean they should ever suffer intimidation. This goes for social media. The Online Safety Act will introduce new protections from abuse, as well respecting recognised news publisher content. It goes for journalists around the world, where we will continue to use British soft power and diplomacy to argue for journalistic freedoms. But it also goes for powerful people using SLAPPs to intimidate journalists away from their pursuit of the public interest. Such behaviour is intolerable and we will tackle the use of SLAPPs to protect investigative journalism, alongside access to justice.

“Because this is a government that will always champion press freedoms. We believe in being held to account. I am determined to show that traditional democratic British values are the only way to deliver the change that working people need – that is my political project in a nutshell. And there can be nothing more traditional, democratic or British than a robust free press, fearlessly holding the powerful to account.”

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