Axel Springer became the latest media company to partner with AI, as news organizations grapple with how best to use the technology while protecting jobs and their financial position.
The German media company announced a partnership Wednesday with OpenAI‘s ChaptGPT, in which ChatGPT will pull from content from Axel Springer’s brands, including Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt, to answer queries. The answers to user questions will include attribution and links to full articles.
“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,” said Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer.
Content from Axel Springer brands will also be used to advance the training of OpenAI’s large language models.
This is the latest news publication to ink a deal with OpenAI, after the Associated Press partnered with OpenAI in July to train the AI models on its archive of news stories. These partnerships bolster the financial position of the organizations, even as leaders weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using the technology within editorial publications. Early this year, IAC mogul Barry Diller said that the news business was at a crossroads and should consider suing AI firms over copyright concerns to protect intellectual property for articles.
In August, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said his company, which owns The Wall Street Journal, was in active discussion with AI and tech companies “to establish a value for our unique content sets and IP that will play a crucial role in the future of AI.” These partnerships would not not only introduce “a new stream of revenues” from AI players, but will also allow the company “to reduce costs across the business.”
Many news organizations, including Axel Springer, are also looking for ways to work with generative artificial intelligence within their organization. The New York Times announced the hiring of Quartz co-founder Zach Seward on Dec. 12 as an editorial director of artificial-intelligence initiatives with the goal of learning “how we do and do not use generative A.I.”
Still, the concern is that the training models could one day be used to replace journalists. The Writers Guild of America brought up similar concerns during the strike and eventually landed on a contract that secured protections against AI penning or rewriting original material or being used as “source material.” Additionally, they reserved the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.”
Actors have also been concerned about the potential use of digital replicas in performances that could allow studios to otherwise circumvent enhanced protections for actors and the use of actors’ actions, movements and facial expressions, among other things, as training data for “synthetic performers.”
