London: OpenAI, the creator of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT, entered a partnership agreement with UK-based Financial Times (FT) on Monday to license its content and develop AI tools.
As part of this collaboration, the esteemed global news publisher will license its material to OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, to assist in the creation of generative AI technology capable of producing text, images, and code that closely mimic human creations.
Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, emphasized, “Our partnership and ongoing dialogue with the FT is about finding creative and productive ways for AI to empower news organizations and journalists, and enrich the ChatGPT experience with real-time, world-class journalism for millions of people globally.”
Furthermore, the FT highlighted its adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise earlier this year, underscoring the significance of the agreement. John Ridding, FT Group CEO, stated, “This is an important agreement in a number of respects. It recognizes the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI.”
OpenAI has forged multiple agreements with news organizations to license their content for training AI models. Axel Springer, publisher of several media outlets including Business Insider, Politico, and the European publications Bild and Welt, has similarly partnered with OpenAI to leverage its articles for data extraction.
However, in December last year, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging unauthorized use of millions of articles to build ChatGPT’s underlying models. The lawsuit highlighted unsuccessful licensing discussions with Microsoft and OpenAI, which persisted for months without resolution.
