OpenAI partners with The Atlantic and The Verge publisher Vox Media

Another week, another round of valuable content partnerships between OpenAI and leading media publishers.

Today, both The Atlantic, the venerable American magazine and digital media powerhouse Vox Media — which owns The Verge, Vox.com, New York Magazine, Thrillist, SB Nation and numerous other titles — announced they are separately partnering with the maker of ChatGPT to license content from their publications for inclusion in the chatbot’s responses.

OpenAI will also get licensed content and data that it can use to train its large language models (LLMs) and multimedia AI models (such as GPT-4o, Sora) on.

Disclosure: (I was formerly employed by both The Atlantic and Vox years ago.)

Full financial deals were not immediately disclosed but the companies said they would get access to OpenAI tech in addition to licensing fees for allowing OpenAI access to their content and data.

A growing list of publishers gobbled up by OpenAI and ChatGPT

The news comes a week after OpenAI announced a similar partnership with News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and other outlets in the U.S. and abroad. It was reportedly worth $250 million over five years, or $50 million a year from OpenAI to the publisher for the privilege of training on and surfacing its content in ChatGPT.

Some journalists — including Jessica Lessin, founder and CEO of The Information, writing in The Atlantic mere days ago — have criticized publishers for being too quick to allow OpenAI access to their valuable content, but it seems the horse has left the barn at many outlets.

So far, OpenAI has struck licensing deals with the following media companies and publications:

Read Vox Media President Pam Wasserstein’s statement on the news below:

Hi everyone,

Today, I’m excited to share that Vox Media has entered a partnership with OpenAI, and I’ll take this opportunity to contextualize this agreement in terms of how the company is addressing AI more broadly. 

The roadmap we’ve set across the company to support audience loyalty and editorial differentiation is even more important in the generative AI era. We must be essential to our audience, and cultivate meaningful relationships with them, to compete in an environment in which platforms are eager to commandeer and commoditize baseline factual information (and, amusingly, present nonsense information as fact, an entirely predictable result of a strategy that does not sufficiently value the contribution of responsible journalism). We also need to create new opportunities for audiences to discover our brands in different contexts as consumer behavior evolves. To achieve these goals, as always, it’s the original elements that most distinguish Vox Media and its editorial brands — authority and judgment, voice, reporting, valuable and entertaining content, community, creative solutions for partners, earned audience trust — that create our indispensability.

This is a rapidly-advancing space and we are approaching it with both enthusiasm and care. There will be ways to accelerate our ambitions using these powerful tools, and that is an exciting opportunity. But we’re also deliberate. Human judgment and creativity are integral to our business, as is our intellectual property. 

I want to make you all aware of the framework that guides our approach to the use of AI-driven technology at Vox Media. Across the company, in this space, we are focused on:

Delivering innovation on behalf of our audiences and customers.

Vox Media has its origins in building better media products, and being tech-forward remains an important part of who we are. We have already developed AI-enabled services that deliver valuable experiences for our audiences and our advertising partners, including, for example, The Strategist’s Gift Scout (https://nymag.com/strategist/gift-scout.html) and capabilities for Forte, our first-party data platform. 

Using assistive tools to elevate human creativity.

We are using AI across the company in a variety of ways today to improve our work processes. If you haven’t yet, you should experiment with these tools within existing editorial and engineering guidance. In the coming weeks, we will be sending out a company-wide policy to guide the use of AI across other departments, as well as a survey to better understand how we are all using AI. If you’re in doubt about whether or how to use an AI tool in the meantime, please get in touch with your team leader.

Expanding and protecting the value of our work and intellectual property (IP)

Vox Media’s published work is protected by copyright law, as well as the terms of service of our websites. We believe that without Vox Media’s permission, robots scraping our sites to train AI models or output that plagiarizes our content violate both copyright law and our terms of use. Having clear contractual rules and appropriate compensation for use of Vox Media’s published content is as relevant in AI as it is in any other context. We will continue to evaluate options in this area, including legal and public policy solutions as well as additional partnerships, to protect our published work and a robust and trustworthy news media ecosystem.

Vox Media’s partnership with OpenAI fits within this framework by:
    •    Ensuring that Vox Media is compensated for OpenAI’s use of our published content, which also continues to set important precedent for our industry.  
    •    Increasing the visibility of our brands while marketing us in a new audience development context, by helping Vox Media to reach ChatGPT’s 100 million users. 
    •    Protecting our intellectual property by requiring attribution to our brands, limiting the summary that can appear in the display, and including links back to our sites when ChatGPT displays or references our published work.
    •    Putting Vox Media among the first in line for certain products from OpenAI and establishing terms for the two companies to collaborate in our use of OpenAI’s technology to develop innovative products for Vox Media’s consumers and advertising partners.

We’ll be issuing a press release announcing this deal shortly. 

We’re proud of this agreement, which is part of a broader approach to ensuring that Vox Media’s work is enhanced and amplified as AI continues to change how we all use the internet, how we inform and receive information, and how we entertain and consume entertainment. We will use this technology to innovate while also continuing to ensure that the important work that we do is valued and protected. At this moment, there is an even greater need for our trusted journalism, community and storytelling: Our work has never been more essential.