• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, December 29, 2023

Several major publishers are in talks with OpenAI, negotiating terms for the licensing of their content. 

The publishers include The Gannett, News Corp. and IAC, owner of The Daily Beast and Dotdash Meredith, according to the New York Times, citing confidential sources. 

The report has not been independently confirmed, but the Times says the talks have been going on for months.  

The Times itself had been in talks with OpenAI, but last week filed suit against that firm and Microsoft for copyright infringement. 

Also holding talks with OpenAI is The New Media Alliance, a group representing 2,200 news organizations in North America, the Times reports. 

According to the Times, OpenAI and Microsoft have sought licensing deals with news organizations to train A.I. systems to produce humanlike prose. 

OpenAI already has deals with The Associated Press and Axel Springer.

Kayla Wood, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said the firm is “continuing to have productive conversations” with many publishers around the world to discuss their questions about A.I.,” the Times continues. 

“We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together in support of a rich news ecosystem,” Wood said. 

In a separate development, the Authors Guild has filed suit against OpenAI on behalf of mystery fiction writers, saying it copied their works “wholesale, without permission or consideration.”

It continues, “Defendants then fed Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works into their ‘large language models’ or ‘LLMs,’ algorithms designed to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.”

The class action plaintiffs include such authors as David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham and Scott Turow.

The suit seeks class action status and basic statuatory charges of $150,000 per infringed work, among other things. 

The Times suit alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI singled out the Times in particular because of its wide newsgathering capabilities and digital strength.

The defendants utilized large-language models (LLMs) “that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more,” the suit continues. 

Both the Times and Authors Guild suits are on file with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.