Latest news with #GrayLady
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
No ‘Gray' Area in New York Times' AI Deal with Amazon
Spoiler alert: The answer to today's Wordle is B-E-Z-O-S. In a first-of-its-kind deal for the historic paper of record, The New York Times last week inked a deal to license its vast editorial library for use in Amazon's various AI platforms. The agreement comes as the Gray Lady sues OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged copyright infringement, one of the major legal battles in the AI-spawned era of copyright war. READ ALSO: Luxury Brands Sweat Consumer Discounting After Price Hikes and Can US Tourism Bounce Back Amid Trade War? Under the licensing deal (financial terms still undisclosed), Jeff Bezos' e-commerce/cloud computing/digital media giant can showcase NYT news articles, recipes, and other material across its consumer-facing AI programs — Alexa will now tell you all about Alison Roman's chickpea coconut stew. It's a first for the NYT but hardly for the rest of the industry. Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Axel Springer, the Associated Press, and the Bezos-owned Washington Post have all struck similar licensing agreements with OpenAI. In a situation similar to the NYT's, with one of the same players, News Corp is concurrently suing Perplexity AI over copyright-infringement claims and licensing its content to OpenAI. Translation: If you want your chatbots to train on and feature these companies' content, pay up. But just how much is news content worth to the AI industry? Depends on whom you ask: According to The Information, OpenAI offers publishers as little as $1 million to $5 million annually to license their content. In late 2023, the NYT reported that Apple was offering $50 million multiyear deals to license news content for AI model training. That's small potatoes compared with the 'billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages' the NYT is claiming in its suit against OpenAI. In that case, the NYT is essentially claiming that OpenAI and Microsoft unlawfully used copyrighted material to train its chatbots, which sometimes appeared to respond with content copy-pasted right from the NYT, siphoning away valuable clicks and subscriptions from the NYT itself while helping OpenAI grow into one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Fair Use It or Lose It: AI firms tend to argue that their models are trained on publicly available data — 'fair use' under copyright law. Whether the law agrees or not is still being sorted out, though it seems clear the AI industry sees its existence hinging on courts agreeing with its interpretation. In the UK, a coterie of high-profile performing artists, including Elton John, Dua Lipa, and Ian McKellan, are pushing for a law that would require artists to opt-in to their works being used to train AI models. Last week, former Deputy Prime Minister and ex-Meta executive Nick Clegg told British outlet The Times that passing such a law in the UK, while other countries do not, 'would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.' This post first appeared on The Daily Upside. To receive delivering razor sharp analysis and perspective on all things finance, economics, and markets, subscribe to our free The Daily Upside newsletter.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The New York Times inks deal with Amazon to license content for AI training
The New York Times on Thursday announced that it will license content from across its newsroom to train Amazon AI models. Under the multi-year deal, Amazon's AI services like Alexa will be able to use Times content, including from NYT Cooking and sports website The Athletic, to produce summaries and short excerpts in real time. The Jeff Bezos-owned company will use decades' worth of the Gray Lady's content to train its AI models. 'The collaboration will make The New York Times's original content more accessible to customers across Amazon products and services, including direct links to Times products, and underscores the companies' shared commitment to serving customers with global news and perspectives within Amazon's AI products,' the Times said in a statement. 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.' Amazon consumers will be provided direct links to Times products 'whenever it makes sense,' a Times spokesperson told CNN. The deal is designed to ensure that when Times articles are used, they're correctly attributed and presented in a way that maintains the paper's journalistic integrity, the spokesperson said. 'We believe this appro ach helps address concerns about potential misrepresentation while making quality journalism more accessible in emerging AI experiences,' the spokesperson said. While the agreement to use content is new, the deal expands an existing relationship in which the Times has used Amazon Music to host its podcasts. The Times remains open to working with other companies, the spokesperson said, so long as they provide fair value in exchange for the paper's content and respect the Gray Lady's reporting through the full scope of AI uses. The Times declined to provide a dollar figure attached to the deal. Licensing deals are viewed by many as a viable recourse as AI companies continue to train chatbots using copyrighted data while pulling in profits. Since chatbots are designed to provide users with in-app answers, making them less likely to click through to publishers' websites and exacerbating traffic woes, the deals afford news publishers a cut of AI profits. The move is a departure from the Times' previous position toward AI chatbots. In December 2023, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the pair of having illegally scraped millions of articles to train ChatGPT and other AI services. And the Times is not alone in accusing chatbots of intellectual theft: Ziff Davis in April sued OpenAI, similarly accusing the company of copyright infringement; and eight Alden Global Capital-owned publications sued OpenAI and Microsoft in April 2024 with similar complaints. The Times isn't the only company to do business with an AI company while engaged in a legal fight with another chatbot maker. While the Rupert Murdoch-owned Dow Jones and New York Post sued Perplexity AI in October for illegally copying content, News Corp in May 2024 signed a years-long deal with OpenAI to license content from the media giant's companies, which include The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Barron's. Still, not all news publishers have been so resistant. The Washington Post, Guardian Media Group, Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, Axios, Reuters, Hearst and the Financial Times are just a few news organizations that have inked deals with AI companies to license their content. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Axios
20-05-2025
- Business
- Axios
The Athletic is solidly profitable
The Athletic has posted a profit for the past three quarters, proving its parent, the New York Times, is good for its word when it comes to Wall Street projections. Why it matters: The sports media startup was losing millions when the Times acquired it in 2022. Times executives assured investors that the site would eventually be accretive to its revenue growth rate after three years. Reality check: If The Athletic didn't become reliably profitable within the time frame the Times projected, it would've made it harder for the Gray Lady to convince investors of its strategy for future acquisitions. Zoom in: A big part of The Athletic's path to profitability has been integrating it further into the New York Times subscription bundle and growing its paid advertising. The New York Times no longer breaks out how many subscribers The Athletic has individually, but it does disclose subscriber numbers for its newsletters. The Pulse had 2.4 million newsletter subscribers a year ago, per Digiday, and is now up to more than 3.5 million, a spokesperson said. The Athletic — which just debuted its 10th newsletter, hockey-focused Red Light — will surpass 6 million subscribers this week, the spokesperson added. Zoom out: The Athletic has started to explore bigger advertising partnerships. Deals with BetMGM, eBay and StubHub have helped it explore sports lifestyle topics such as betting, collectibles and ticketing, respectively. Those types of opportunities are expected to be a big part of The Athletic's commercial expansion, executives previously told Axios. The Athletic has expanded in audio. This week, it said " The Tennis Podcast" was joining The Athletic Podcast Network. And last month, it signed an ad sales deal with Swedish podcast company Acast for audio ads, podcast sponsorships, podcast video and branded content. What to watch: While The Athletic has mostly focused on text and audio to date, the company has invested more in video. That could drive more commercial opportunities. At a NewFronts presentation earlier this month, The Athletic announced "No Free Lunch," a digital series hosted by former NFL player Ndamukong Suh. The Athletic is partnering with the NBA and WNBA to provide highlights embedded in its articles and its app. It said it will use footage in video journalism, including game breakdowns called "The Athletic Spotlight," Zach Harper's commentary "The Bounce Weekly-ish" and video essays. Last year, Fubo
