OpenAI could evolve to be a force of good in journalism
OpenAI has a complicated relationship with journalism at the moment. As it stands, it could evolve to be a force of good, a ‘Jedi’ to support journalism, support high quality content, and the open web. Or OpenAI can decide not to do this, and evolve to be a Sith Lord, not pay and not attribute. Adam Singolda, the CEO of Taboola, examines the issue.
The NYT is hitting back against the threat that AI poses to the legitimacy of the news industry, filing a lawsuit last month against OpenAI and Microsoft to end the use of its stories to train chatbots.
The Times claims the companies are threatening its livelihood and reputation by effectively stealing billions of dollars of work generated by its journalists. How? By feeding Times’ material (often verbatim!) to people seeking answers from generative AI like ChatGPT.
The issue for the Times is two-fold: one, generative AI diverts traffic away from the paper’s print and digital platforms, making it less likely that users will pay for the original source of the information.
Additionally, AI companies use online news articles to train chatbots, but the ‘bots don’t always get it right, which endangers the reputation of legitimate news sites.
If you believe the past repeats itself (as Karl Marx suggested), then we’ve actually seen a very similar scenario before. Meta (then Facebook), almost a decade ago in 2015, launched Instant Articles. It was an initiative to host publisher content on Facebook and keep users locked on their platform to read it. Despite using valuable news articles and hard work from journalists, Facebook did not pay a lot (or anything at all) to publishers, and stopped sending any traffic to publishers. Facebook benefitted as their app a lot faster, and on paper the user experience was better. In the end, it broke, and funny enough (or not), NYTimes was among the first publishers to get out of Facebook Instant Articles. Many publishers followed.
10 years later. Where does that leave us with OpenAI dynamics with publishers?
OpenAI has their own argument for why they are right to use publicly accessible news stories to train their AI, and maybe they are right. Maybe crawling the web the way they do is no different than the way Google crawls the web.
However, like many “debates,” the majority of time it doesn’t even matter who is right, but rather what is your desired outcome, what is your culture, your identity, your values. Looking back – what do you want to be remembered for? OpenAI could evolve to be a force of good, a ‘Jedi’ to support journalism, support high quality content, and the open web. Or they can decide not to do it, and evolve to be a Sith Lord, not pay and not attribute.
If the top 100 sites in the world (Wikipedia, NYTimes, Reddit, etc) block OpenAI or even demand it deprecates their data from their past crawl, then OpenAI would be much less valuable.
On the flip side, GenAI is such a revolution, perhaps one of the biggest things we’ve seen since the internet started – can it really be ignored?
My opinion is that OpenAI will do the right thing. The Information reported OpenAI is considering paying up to $5M to license content from publishers to train its AI. And from my point of view, OpenAI should pay whatever publishers want, and more. As opposed to Facebook which is a 100% advertising company, OpenAI has the opportunity to put their technology at the hands of hundreds of millions of users through partnerships with enterprise accounts all over the world, and charge for it.
In fact they can charge for it a lot, if you compare how much enterprise accounts pay for cloud services, this can easily be a $100B a year revenue to OpenAI. So if that’s the case, does it matter if publishers are being paid a lot? Not to mention, OpenAI will be remembered to be on the right side of history, as opposed to what Facebook did to publishers and the open web.
Given the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, I also think Microsoft is a better life partner to journalism than Facebook ever was, or in fact wanted to be. And that makes me also think that OpenAI will do the right thing, and where Facebook failed, Microsoft will succeed in making the open web and journalism stronger, and pay editorial teams for the important content they deserve.
I also remind myself as a parent how important this question is. We (humanity) need a very very strong, thriving open web and journalism. With social networks endangering the future of our children, surfacing so much hate, and fake news, god help us – we need editorial teams like we need oxygen.
In summary – I’m optimistic.
My opinion is that OpenAI will do the right thing. It is never too late to be a Jedi.
Adam Singolda is the CEO of Taboola
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