Financial Times, OpenAI sign content licensing partnership

THE Financial Times had signed a licensing agreement with OpenAI to train artificial intelligence (AI) models on its attributed content, the newspaper said on Monday (Apr 29), in the latest media tie-up for the Microsoft-backed startup.

The agreement will enhance OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT with attributed FT content, and the firms will collaborate on developing new AI products and features for FT readers.

The partnership also lets ChatGPT use select summaries, quotes and links to FT’s stories on its chatbot, the paper said in a statement, without disclosing financial terms of the deal.

OpenAI struck a similar deal with the Associated Press last year where the news publisher licenced a part its archive of news stories to OpenAI.

ChatGPT, which kickstarted the GenAI boom in late 2022, can mimic human conversation and perform tasks such as creating summaries of long text, writing poems and even generating ideas for a theme party.

Some outlets are already using generative AI for their content. BuzzFeed has said it will use AI to power personality quizzes on its site, and the New York Times used ChatGPT to create a Valentine’s Day message-generator last year. REUTERS