Washington Post and OpenAI ink content-sharing deal

Publishing giants Politico, Vox, Wired and Vanity Fair have also signed similar deals with the ChatGPT maker.

The Jeff Bezos-owned publication The Washington Post has signed a deal with OpenAI to allow its news to be used by ChatGPT.

As part of the deal, ChatGPT will display “summaries, quotes and links” to the publication’s original reporting in response to relevant queries on the chatbot, the two companies said.

OpenAI said it has formed similar partnerships with more than 20 news publishers and 160 outlets across 20 languages.

Last year, media conglomerate Hearst, with its more than 20 magazine brands and 40 newspapers including Cosmopolitan and Elle inked a content-sharing partnership with the ChatGPT maker

While Condé Nast, the publisher behind Vogue, Vanity Fair and Wired, also signed a content deal with OpenAI.

Similarly, Time magazine, News Corp, Politico’s parent company Axel Springer, Vox Media and even the social media platform Reddit have partnered up with OpenAI allowing it access to their content.

“We’re all in on meeting our audiences where they are,” said Peter Elkins-Williams, the head of global partnerships at The Washington Post.

“Ensuring ChatGPT users have our impactful reporting at their fingertips builds on our commitment to provide access where, how and when our audiences want it.”

While Varun Shetty, the head of media partnerships at OpenAI, said that more than 500m people use ChatGPT weekly.

“By investing in high-quality journalism by partners like The Washington Post, we’re helping ensure our users get timely, trustworthy information when they need it,” he said.

OpenAI has been increasingly partnering up with news publications, trying to stave off criticisms of copyright infringement.

This, as the New York Times landed the AI start-up in legal hot water in 2023 over claims that chatbots, including ChatGPT, are trained on millions of articles it published “without permission or payment”.

Although OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, a US district court recently ruled that it would go ahead, denying the ChatGPT maker’s motion to dismiss claims of direct and contributory infringement and trademark dilution, among others.

However, two other news outlets lost a similar case to OpenAI where they claimed that the company violated copyright law by scraping their news article to train its AI models.

Meanwhile, many of the publications which have signed content-sharing deals with OpenAI recently sued the Canadian AI company Cohere over allegations that it scrapes copies of published articles, trains its AI models using the data, and in turn, uses the outputs to compete with the outlets it ‘stole’ the data from.

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