Time has also struck a deal with OpenAI

Well, another one bites the dust… OpenAI is striking deals with companies to gain access to their content legally. Several major publications and parent companies are striking deals with OpenAI, and that worries a lot of the community. According to a new report, Time has just made a deal with OpenAI to grant the company more than a century’s worth of information.

We didn’t see this coming, but we kinda did. With the threat of AI looming over several industries, we thought the journalism industry would put up more of a fight. We assumed that The New York Times would be the flagship leading a fleet of companies against the march of AI. However, some HEAVY players have folded and made deals that serve up their content to ChatGPT on a silver platter.

These companies include The Associated Press, Axel Springer (owns Business Insider), News Corp, Vox Media (Owns The Verge), The Atlantic, and more. So, the New York Times is the black sheep of the group with its lawsuit.

Time just struck a multi-year deal with OpenAI

Another major player in the news industry has taken the money and ran, Time. This is a company that, on March 3rd this year, celebrated its 101st birthday. Since it made a deal, it will make all or most of its backlog of news available to OpenAI. Time is a company that’s been around long enough to report on the Great Depression and the Second World War. So, you know that it’s giving up a TON of data.

Deals like these involve money changing hands. For example, the deal with News Corp saw OpenAI paying it $250 million over five years. However, we don’t know how much money Time is getting for this deal and how long it’s going to last.

Spreading the love

This story isn’t all gray skies and spilled milk. According to Time, this isn’t a move to pad the company’s wallet. Time has been looking for a way to expose its content to a broader audience. It wants to spread it to a younger and more diverse reader base. That’s something that any publication would want to do.

As the deal goes, ChatGPT will be able to surface Time’s content in its responses. Along with that, ChatGPT will also post links back to the original article. So, this is a move that will, ostensibly, improve traffic to the site. Time gets a ton of traffic from Google, but with AI Overviews, the company might be looking for other avenues for traffic.

We’ll just have to see if people will actually want to go to the original source. Let’s not BS ourselves, most people go to ChatGPT to avoid going to different sources. Why read a whole article to find the answer to a question when the answer is given to you?

In any case, this is the way the world is going to operate, apparently. Let’s just hope that these companies know what they’re doing.