Amazon strikes AI licensing deal with Hearst and Condé Nast

Digiday is reporting that media conglomerates Hearst and Condé Nast have signed multi-year licensing agreements with Amazon to allow its AI shopping assistant Rufus access to the vast library of content held by the two companies. Between Hearst and Condé Nast, Rufus will have access to Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vogue and The New Yorker, just to name a few.

A Hearst spokesperson confirmed to Digiday that the licensing deal with Amazon will allow Rufus broad access to its newspapers and magazines. The publication also received confirmation from Condé Nast. Further details on the arrangements have not been shared.

Rufus is a chatbot built to answer shoppers' questions on product recommendations and other shopping-related needs. The AI tool is trained on Amazon's catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and "information from across the web." The strong commerce angle found in much of the Hearst and Condé Nast catalog makes the publishers suitable matches for the AI to train on.

This follows a slew of licensing deals over the last few years between content publishers and tech giants seeking more content on which to train AI. For Condé Nast, this actually marks the second major AI deal for the media company since it entered into a multi-year partnership with OpenAI last year to display content from its various publications in ChatGPT.

Amazon recently struck a licensing arrangement with The New York Times and its adjacent properties, all while the iconic newspaper is embroiled in a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement.

From Disney and Universal suing Midjourney to Reddit signing an AI deal, these latest signings are a continuation of the existential back-and-forth between content creators protecting their intellectual property and AI companies' seemingly endless appetite for more content on which to train their various models.

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