The company is said to be partnering with Hearst, a big media conglomerate. What will impress you is this company’s huge portfolio, but some of the notable brands from that group include the Houston Chronicle and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and Elle, among others. The deal will see its products, including ChatGPT and SearchGPT, featuring over 20 magazine brands and over 40 newspaper brands.
Our partnership with OpenAI will help us evolve the future of magazine content, said Debi Chirichella, president of Hearst Magazines. Under the deal, proper citations for its content included in ChatGPT will send the users back to the original sources. The partnership is, however, to be limited to its non-newspaper and non-magazine businesses.
This deal fits within a larger pattern of media companies coming to content deals with AI companies. Last month, OpenAI said it had struck a similar deal with Condé Nast, covering the brands Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired, among others. In July, Perplexity AI announced a revenue-share model for publishers, and so far, several top titles – Fortune, Time, and Der Spiegel, to name a few – have signed on to the model.
For instance, OpenAI recently managed to secure a multi-year deal with Time for the rights to over a century’s worth of current and archived articles. Such a deal would allow OpenAI to promote Time’s content on its ChatGPT platform and use it to improve its products. In May, OpenAI also made an agreement with News Corp to access Wall Street Journal articles, as well as access MarketWatch, Barron’s and the New York Post. About the same time, Reddit claimed it had an agreement with OpenAI where it could utilize its network to train the models.
In this increasingly expansive AI-generated content world, media houses are now finding ways to safeguard their intellectual property. In June, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the nation’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its main backer, Microsoft, accusing the firm of copyright infringement. It is joined by several other publications, including The New York Times, which seeks accountability for its journalistic content allegedly used without permission in AI training data. OpenAI has disputed the characterizations of these news organizations.
In this changing environment, the partnership between OpenAI and Hearst is a development that signals a new shift at the intersection of media and artificial intelligence; therefore, there are opportunities and challenges arising in content distribution in the future.
