The rise of AI chatbots has shaken the news industry. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini were trained on text scraped from the web, including news articles, without payment or permission. The tools also answer people’s questions directly, increasing concerns that people will simply get their information from Big Tech chatbots instead of paying journalists to report and write the news. Some organizations, including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, have sued OpenAI for scraping their articles. Other publishers, including Politico parent company Axel Springer, the Associated Press and the Financial Times, have signed deals with OpenAI.
News organizations have been buffeted by technological changes for years. New technologies, such as social media, have often offered a rush of money and new readers to news organizations. But when the technology changes, that money and readership often falls away. News publishers such as BuzzFeed and Vice News grew rapidly during the rise of social media, but when Facebook owner Meta decided to show less news in its users’ feeds, those companies’ revenue cratered.
Now, journalists are debating how to approach AI. Many are concerned that AI could supplant them, with tech companies such as OpenAI and Google scraping news articles and social media websites to cobble together their own AI-generated news articles. Google recently rolled out AI answers in search to its U.S. users, spurring panic and accusations of unfairness and plagiarism from bloggers and news providers. Unlike OpenAI, Google has not signed deals with news organizations to pay for their content.
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The union representing Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones workers said in a statement posted to X that it was “disturbed” that the deal was cut before the news organization had finalized policies about using human-written content for AI, which the union is currently negotiating with the company.
OpenAI, for its part, said the deal would set standards for how AI companies and news organizations should interact.
“We greatly value News Corp’s history as a leader in reporting breaking news around the world, and are excited to enhance our users’ access to its high-quality reporting,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
The deal comes as OpenAI faces allegations from actor Scarlett Johansson that the company copied her voice for its “Sky” audio chatbot. The voice has been available since September, but after the company used it in a demo last week, Johansson made a statement saying that Altman had reached out to her twice about working with the company but that she had declined. OpenAI says the voice is not meant to copy her and was trained on recordings made from a different actor.
correction
A previous version of this story contained a photo showing the Daily Telegraph of London, which is not owned by News Corp. News Corp. owns the Daily Telegraph of Sydney, Australia. The photo has been changed.
