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New Intelligence Report

Editor: Yongyong Qiao Yang

【New Wisdom Introduction】OpenAI has formed an alliance with seven media outlets, spending money to buy out the content produced by the media, and establishing itself as the new "Internet homepage" and information portal after Google and social media. What does this mean for the media industry and readers? Can OpenAI succeed? Senior media professionals have an in-depth interpretation: This goes against the interests of the media, and OpenAI may not be the winner. The decision may be in the hands of readers.

On May 30, OpenAI announced partnerships with two leading media publishers: The Atlantic and Vox Media.

The Atlantic Monthly is a 167-year-old publisher that has remained relevant in the digital and internet age thanks to its opinion columns and high-quality articles.

Vox Media is a new media startup. Although it does not have a long history, it has achieved remarkable results as a rising star.

The company grew out of the popular sports blog SB Nation, launched the popular technology media The Verge in 2011, and launched the political and general news media Vox in 2014.

Vox Media has been on an acquisition spree in recent years, acquiring well-respected and award-winning media outlets, including New York magazine.

In less than a year, OpenAI has formed alliances with seven major media outlets.

Some of these media also control a number of influential and tasteful magazines, such as the German publisher Axel Springer, which controls Politico, Business Insider and BILD.

Here’s a full list of the seven major media outlets that have partnered with OpenAI and when they started.

• The Atlantic Monthly – May 2024

• Vox Media – May 2024

• Meredith Dotdash – May 2024

• Financial Times – April 2024

• Axel Springer – December 2023

• Associated Press – July 2023

• American Journalism Project (AJP) – July 2023

Specific terms of many of the deals have not been disclosed because many of them are private companies that are not required to disclose all of their financial transactions.

But OpenAI is said to have paid tens of millions of dollars for the privilege of being with the publisher.

In addition, a whistleblower from technology media VentureBeat said that VentureBeat had also had contact with OpenAI.

I should point out that VentureBeat itself (though not me personally) has had our employees contact OpenAI to discuss possible partnerships, but I have no idea how those negotiations took place or what was discussed, other than the sections about us taking place over the past year.

From this, it seems that more and more media and publishers will establish cooperation with OpenAI in the future.

What OpenAI wants to do

Why is OpenAI working with these media companies?

Obviously, by doing so, it can gain access to licensed training data that can be used to build powerful new AI models that will be able to write as well as the Journal’s reporters.

OpenAI's goal is to improve the performance of ChatGPT and eventually hope to commercialize these tools and sell them to these media or other media in the field.

For digital media organizations like Vox, which produces video content for YouTube and licensed documentaries and series for Netflix, OpenAI can use its work to train Sora, a generative AI video model.

Why is OpenAI willing to pay?

In order to train large models, OpenAI previously unceremoniously captured almost all public posts on the Internet.

The move has drawn strong resistance from artists, creative people, and even media companies such as The New York Times.

The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement after it scraped articles from the site for training

This has caused OpenAI to no longer adhere to its position of "legally grabbing public data to achieve change", and they have been challenged in data ethics.

So OpenAI rolled out a piece of code last year that lets website owners add their own sites to a list to stop it from scraping them for training.

OpenAI also recently announced that it would create a new product, Media Manager, which artists, creators, and publishers can use to mark works they intend to or have already published online as works they do not want to see crawled by AI tools and used to train models.

However, this won’t happen until 2025, and content creators may not necessarily buy in.

Therefore, for the popular OpenAI, paying publishers to shut up and accept AI crawling and training is not a losing business.

On the one hand, it can help the company get out of trouble and obtain the data it needs. On the other hand, it can also give an explanation to investors and users, demonstrating that the company complies with copyright laws and ethical standards.

And the content owners don't get any real rewards in this process.

Will media publishers benefit?

Without exception, publishers who have announced OpenAI content licensing agreements do get something, the most important of which is not money but "position."

Specifically, almost all publishers noted that ChatGPT will display their articles in its output.

So if a user types in “summarize the latest tech news,” they might display summaries of articles from Business Insider, The Verge (owned by Vox), The Wall Street Journal, or any other publication included in the deal, along with links to the sources.

This is just one possible scenario, and the exact protocol or technical documentation has not been shared publicly.

Additionally, it’s unclear how ChatGPT will use content from the media, and if it summarizes the original text in a “robotic” style, it could obliterate the artistry of the original author’s work.

Moreover, since users have read the summarized news on ChatGPT, they will not choose to visit the website of the first article, which will cause these publications to lose traffic. For publications, this means losing paying users or commercial value.

That’s why veteran industry figures like The Information founder Jessica Lessin, former Gawker reporter Hamilton Nolan, and former Vice reporter Edward Onswego, Jr. have pointed out the harsh consequences publishers have borne in their deals with OpenAI.

After all, if readers are looking for pure information, and ChatGPT provides them with pure information, then what is the point of them visiting the original media, let alone paying for a subscription.

Users will choose to become ChatGPT Plus and pay OpenAI $20 per month instead of patronizing the media that produces content.

History Repeats Itself

What’s happening now is reminiscent of when Google News launched in 2006, as social platforms like Facebook and Twitter began to grow in user numbers and popularity and quickly became a major source of referral traffic for publishers.

This has been the case for the past 15-20 years, but traffic has fluctuated due to the management and algorithmic adjustments of the tech giants behind these platforms.

When a tech platform suddenly changes its algorithm and causes its audience to disappear, sites that have invested too much energy in a single platform or strategy can quickly find themselves at a loss.

Of course, changes are still happening, and arguably the biggest change is now looming before technology platforms and publishers: generative AI.

As Google places its own faulty AI-generated summary results at the top of search results pages and pushes down direct links to publishers and news articles, more and more people may choose to adopt ChatGPT as a news source or aggregator.

News publishers and executives at parent companies may feel backed into a corner: The game is changing again, with artificial intelligence arriving to replace the traditional ways people get news online. So why not partner with the disruptors and try to ride the wave?

Except, as the brief history lesson above shows, tech companies have always changed their strategies and tools randomly and unpredictably, much to the chagrin of media companies.

While OpenAI is now on friendly terms with publishers, there is no indication from what has been publicly learned that this will last, or that it will allow publishers to maintain the revenue and users they have cultivated in the past.

Furthermore, the more publishers OpenAI works with, the more dilute each publisher’s value as a potential source of information for ChatGPT becomes, and the entire media industry becomes more commoditized — all of them becoming fodder for OpenAI’s models and summaries.

The optimistic rationale for these partnerships is “well, technology is changing, media habits are changing, and we can no longer rely on Google or social sites to reach our audiences anyway.”

So this might be the least bad option for media publishers.

However, with so many companies voluntarily collaborating with OpenAI, it’s not hard to see where the balance of power is tilting.

There are always people who refuse to be recruited

Although many media are rushing to cooperate with OpenAI, there are also some who "go against the trend", such as the rise of independent publishers such as 404 Media, Platformer, and Newcome. These publications are mainly built on the technical infrastructure provided by newsletter platforms such as Substack.

They are taking a different path, trying to build as direct relationships with readers and subscribers as possible, using underlying technology provided by hot startups.

However, these publications are small, with limited staff and resources, and cannot conduct large investigations like large newspapers and broadcasters.

Such large investigations used to be conducted by major newspapers and broadcasters, they won awards and in some cases changed the course of history.

However, as ratings for broadcast and cable news decline and more young people turn to other news sources such as YouTube and TikTok, newspapers themselves are also losing readership, and it is unclear whether audiences are interested in the investigations that newspapers and broadcast media once offered.

What does this mean for the media industry and readers?

What impact does the audience's move away from traditional media and its in-depth investigations have on democracy, the information ecosystem, and even our interpersonal relationships and society?

Maybe we shouldn't be so pessimistic and say this will ruin everything.

Social media has made it possible for anyone to become a citizen journalist, bringing together citizen journalists and amateur detectives alike in an effort to dig up important information (or at least more juicy gossip).

But as fewer people access and interact with traditional media, and overall news consumption rates continue to decline, will there be more "digital mobs" on the Internet? This is not good for people to understand the world and form a community.

So, what is the future of ChatGPT? Will it become the new “homepage of the Internet” for many people like Google?

The answer is not certain.

Because Facebook tried the same thing, but it ultimately deprioritized news in favor of user-generated content shared by “friends and family.”

It’s possible that OpenAI, like other tech companies, will find that its users aren’t really coming to ChatGPT looking for news.

References:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-is-devouring-the-media-industry/