In a significant move towards integrating artificial intelligence with media content, several major tech companies have announced partnerships with prominent publishers. Similarly, OpenAI recently signed partnership agreements with Condé Nast and with Axel Springer. These partnerships are designed to improve the overall ChatGPT model by training it on their content. Big tech is continuing to intensify their lobbying campaign for a federal licensing of news and information. This trend is representative of an increasing partnership with more traditional media.
Amazon has made the same deal with The New York Times. Under this deal, the tech behemoth is provided with free reign to use the publication’s material in AI training. At the same time, Perplexity has signed up a deal with Gannett, deepening the media industry’s growing network of partnerships designed to help train AI.
Microsoft is doing very good work. And as such, they have begun to pay publishers for the content that’s used to train their ChatGPT-like Copilot feature. This advance announcement is a testament to the increasing appreciation for the power of original work in this new era of AI.
Creative Commons has now launched CC Signals to help with that. This new framework is intended as a tool to help develop that open AI ecosystem. The musicians organization expressed particular pride in its support for the Rights Licensing Standard (RSL). This new effort is intended to make it easier for companies to responsibly share anonymized datasets. Perhaps most notably, RSL has been funded by big investors, including Yahoo, Ziff Davis, and O’Reilly Media. In support of the RSL, tech companies Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly have joined to push a standardized method for content licensing.
Creative Commons now joins the growing chorus opposed to “pay-to-crawl” technology. This approach could potentially allow websites to sustain the creation and sharing of their content while managing its use in AI models.
“Implemented responsibly, pay-to-crawl could represent a way for websites to sustain the creation and sharing of their content, and manage substitutive uses, keeping content publicly accessible where it might otherwise not be shared or would disappear behind even more restrictive paywalls.” – Creative Commons (CC) blog post.
CC Signals also releases a new social contract. This contract is a strong first step in addressing the challenges of content sharing as we know it in our new digital landscape. AI technologies are changing at an astonishing pace. Creative Commons is ready to lead the way in setting the terms under which companies can responsibly engage with and utilize media content.
This unprecedented intersection of technology and media spurs important conversations specific to intellectual property rights, monetizing content in the future, and more. Perhaps most importantly, these companies have created powerful, close-knit partnerships. They understand that we need to develop smart collaborative frameworks that protect and compensate original journalism while leveraging the capabilities of AI.
As these developments unfold, stakeholders across both sectors will likely need to adapt to new business models and licensing agreements. How states navigate these changes will be key. The industry is aptly and excitedly marching toward a more consolidated, multi-modal, and connected future—with AI more deeply influencing the ways we create and disseminate content.