Public Relations | Books | Newsjacking | Artificial Intelligence
The New York Times Company and Amazon announced yesterday that Amazon is licensing editorial content from The New York Times, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic for AI-related uses. This is an exciting development in the world of AI where many sources of paid content have been stolen to train AI.
The deal is “consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” The New York Times Company’s CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in an internal memo obtained by CNN. “It aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights.”
Tech companies including OpenAI, Meta, and others have trained their AI on content from publishers without permission.
For example, I wrote about this in my article Move Fast and Steal Things: Meta Pirated 53 of My Books and Stories to Train Their AI. Within the database that Meta used without permissions are 53 of my own copyrighted works, including various editions of the books I’ve written, some co-authored books, a book where I wrote a foreword, and one story published in a magazine.
As I frequently say, I’m totally cool with Generative AI tools training on all content that I put out there for free! Have at my twenty years of blog posts, my videos, the 300+ podcast episodes I was a guest on, or anything else on the public web.
However, Meta and other AI companies chose to rip off my paid content without my permission (or my publishers’ permission) and use it in ways I didn’t authorize.
The New York Times Company and Amazon are taking a leadership position here. Both companies recognize the value of human created paid content and are doing the right thing by striking a licensing deal.
There are many lawsuits filed by publishers against the AI companies pending. Soon the courts will have to decide if the content was used illegally or if it is considered Fair Use.
Until then, I am happy to see this development.
