Condé Nast and OpenAI announced Tuesday a multi-year partnership to surface content from the publisher’s brands, including Vogue, Wired and The New Yorker, within the artificial intelligence startup’s products, including ChatGPT and its SearchGPT prototype.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The firm, which is backed by Microsoft and run by Sam Altman, has signed similar deals with Time magazine, the Financial Times, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, French newspaper Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media in recent months. The deals give OpenAI access to the large text archives held by publishers, which are needed both to train large language models like ChatGPT and to find insights in real time.
OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence-powered search engine SearchGPT in July, offering real-time access to information from across the internet, making inroads into territory long dominated by Google. The deal with the magazine publisher gives the search engine permission to display information and citations from Condé’s articles in its results.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, said the company is committed to working with Condé Nast and other news publishers to “ensure that as AI plays a larger role in news discovery and delivery, it maintains accuracy, integrity and respect for quality reporting.”
In an email published by the New York Times, Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said the deal will offset some of the revenue the tech companies have taken from publishers in recent years. He wrote: “Generative AI is rapidly changing the ways audiences discover information. It is critical that we reach audiences where they are and embrace new technologies, while ensuring proper attribution and compensation for the use of our intellectual property.”
Other media companies have taken the opposite stance. The New York Times and The Intercept have sued OpenAI for using their articles. The litigation is ongoing.
