The Financial Times has reached an agreement with ChatGPT developer OpenAI, allowing its content to be used in the training of artificial intelligence systems.
The Financial Times will receive an undisclosed payment as part of the deal, which is the latest agreed between OpenAI and news publishers.
Under the agreement, ChatGPT users will receive summaries and quotes from FT journalism, as well as links to articles, in response to requests, where appropriate.
John Ridding, chief executive of the FT Group, said it was “right” for AI companies to pay publishers for their material.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, over the use of its content to train large language models, the technology that underpins chatbots like ChatGPT.
“OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution and compensation, all of which are essential to us,” Ridding said. “At the same time, users are clearly interested in these products containing reliable sources.”
OpenAI has already signed similar agreements with the American news agency Associated Press, the French newspaper Le Monde, Prisa Media, owner of El País, and the German Axel Springer, which publishes the tabloid Bild.
Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer at OpenAI, said it was important for the company to “represent quality journalism as these products take shape.”
“As with any transformative technology, there is potential for significant advances and significant challenges, but what is never possible is going back in time,” he said.
Chatbots like ChatGPT are at the forefront of advances in generative AI, the term for technology that can produce compelling text, images or audio from simple handwritten prompts.
However, the models underlying these tools are based on large amounts of data taken from the Internet, including copyrighted text and images.
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Authors including Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Game of Thrones writer George RR Martin are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement in the United States.
Getty Images, which owns one of the largest collections of photographs in the world, is suing the company behind the Stable Diffusion image generator in the United Kingdom for a similar reason.
Last year, Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, said in an open letter that a team in her newsroom would “experiment responsibly” with artificial intelligence tools and train journalists in using generative AI for “discovery.” of stories.”
However, it said it would be transparent in its use of technology and that its journalism would continue to be written by humans.