Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
OpenAI announced a partnership with Hearst, the media conglomerate behind outlets like the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Elle and others.
Under the partnership, OpenAI’s products, such as ChatGPT and SearchGPT, will be able to display content from more than 20 magazine brands and more than 40 newspapers, the company’s announced on Tuesday.
“Our partnership with OpenAI will help us evolve the future of magazine content,” Hearst Magazines President Debi Chirichella said in a statement.
As part of the agreement, Hearst content in ChatGPT will include appropriate citations and link users to the original Hearst sources, the media company said in the announcement. Heart’s non-magazine and newspaper businesses will not be included in the partnership.
The deal is the latest in a recent trend of media outlets entering into content partnerships with AI startups.
OpenAI announced a similar partnership in August with Condé Nast, which owns media brands such as Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair and Wired.
Perplexity AI debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers in July following more than a month of plagiarism accusations. Media outlets and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com were the first to join Perplexity AI’s “Publishers Program.”
OpenAI and Time announced a “multi-year content deal” in June that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of the magazine’s history. OpenAI will be able to display Time’s content within its ChatGPT chatbot in response to user questions, according to the magazine, and use Time’s content “to enhance its products,” or, likely, to train its AI models.
In May, OpenAI announced a partnership with News Corp., allowing OpenAI to access current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, the New York Post and other publications. Reddit also announced a deal with OpenAI in May to allow the ChatGPT maker to train its AI models on the social media company’s content.
Other news publications and media outlets are aggressively trying to protect their businesses as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent.
The Center for Investigative Reporting, the country’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and its lead backer Microsoft in federal court in June for alleged copyright infringement, following similar suits from publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.
The New York Times in December filed a suit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging intellectual property violations related to its journalistic content appearing in ChatGPT training data. The newspaper said it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’s uniquely valuable works,” according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. OpenAI disagreed with the publication’s characterization of events.
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