Open AI makes licensing deal with Alex Springer

Axel Springer, a big media company, is teaming up with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. They want to use AI to improve journalism.

What’s going on here?

The companies will integrate recent news content into ChatGPT to provide users with authoritative, up-to-date information.

What does this mean?

ChatGPT will now give users summaries and links to some of Axel Springer's articles from places like POLITICO and BUSINESS INSIDER (plus European publications BILD and WELT). So people get access to good information that's normally behind a paywall.

What's in it for Axel Springer? They get to put their content into ChatGPT to keep readers up-to-date. And they can build other AI stuff using OpenAI's technology. OpenAI also gets to use Axel Springer's articles to train its AI models.

Why should I care?

Both companies are serious about using AI to help journalism thrive into the future. The goal is to make sure publishers can keep funding solid reporting, even with all the new technology shaking things up.

In the end, it's good for users and good for journalism. You get AI systems serving up better facts and data. News organizations can keep digging up what matters. It's using tech responsibly to inform people and support public knowledge. Pretty chill way for AI and journalism to work together if you ask me!

One concern that I saw on X is that there is a hypocrisy in licensing data from big media companies while claiming that training on huge amounts of other copyrighted work, often from smaller companies and individuals, is fair use.