SPLIT
How should publishers deal with AI platforms?
Photo: Vicki Hamilton on Pixabay.
This week brought further examples of the two approaches content copyrights are taking when dealing with AI platforms.
One option is to take legal action against them, the other is to reach agreements.
A group of authors filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the company of using their copyrighted works to train their AI-powered chatbot, Claude.
The lawsuit states: “It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model is to profit from the exploitation of the human expression and ingenuity behind each of these works.”
As The Guardian reported, the authors stated in their lawsuit that Anthropic had “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Late last year, the New York Times filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of attempting to “exploit the Times’ massive investment in its journalism by using it to develop substitute products without permission or payment.”
Other copyright holders are taking a different approach. This week, Condé Nast followed Axel Springer, Le Monde and NewsCorp in striking a deal with OpenAI.
The agreement gives OpenAI access to the publisher’s content to meet its ongoing needs for training data and timely and reliable information, which will be a key component of the SearchGPT offering still under development.
Condé CEO Roger Lynch told employees: “It is critical that we reach our audiences where they are and embrace new technologies, while ensuring appropriate attribution and compensation for the use of our intellectual property.”
Typically, financial terms were not disclosed, so we cannot say exactly how “fair” the compensation is. Secrecy seems to be a feature of these deals. I can’t imagine why…
On one level, the deal represents an admission that LLMs are here to stay, so it would be better to get the deal done as early as possible because the financial value of such deals to publishers is likely to decline as more publishers sign up.
(By the way, Claude was used in the workflow of this article, but, I hasten to add, not in its creation…)
James Evelegh’s regular column can be found in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can sign up to receive here.
