The Financial Times deal with OpenAI highlights an uneasy future for both media and tech

Another week, another uneasy deal between Big Tech and the publications covering its players. OpenAI announced Monday that it had struck a deal with the Financial Times to license the newspaper’s journalistic output as training data for its large language models, which in turn power chatbots like ChatGPT.

The FT is the latest outlet to agree to terms with OpenAI, which has already struck deals with publishers in the U.K., U.S., France, Spain, and Germany, among other countries. In what’s been an especially brutal stretch for the media sector, these licensing deals offer newsrooms at least a sliver of hope.

“The deal is good news for the FT and perhaps an inspiration for other large news media interested in striking a deal for incremental additional revenue,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

While particulars of the deal haven’t been released, it’s good news for media outlets that OpenAI is willing to cough up the cash, and OpenAI’s latest deal comes as tech firms are grappling with a dearth of good training data on the market now that LLM makers have already hoovered up most of the internet—and have been locked out by “do not crawl” demands by the remainder.

Past research suggests that AI companies could run out of training data by 2026, while a study led by the late University of Cambridge researcher Ross Anderson warned that in the absence of high-quality human-generated training data, LLMs could experience “model collapse,” wherein they’re trained on their own outputs and start to malfunction, much in the way inbreeding affects mammals.

The FT news also comes at a time when AI companies are dealing with a litany of legal issues around their training data. Just this week, eight newspapers owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using their content in training data. “I see this as an approach of tech companies to alleviate some of the copyright infringement they risk,” says independent researcher and consultant Lukasz Olejnik.

However, Olejnik is interested to see whether any comments he provides to FT reporters (he’s been a source there for more than a decade) could change ChatGPT’s perception of him, and therefore what it generates when asked about him. Indeed, a data protection complaint filed this week in Austria by Noyb, a data rights campaign group, raises concerns that ChatGPT queries could yield incorrect data about individuals. 

One notable thing missing in the FT’s own write-up of its landmark deal? A cash value.

The fact that the licensing deals have not been announced alongside financials makes it difficult to establish a market value for publications’ back catalogs. In July 2023, the Associated Press was one of the first to ink a deal with the makers of ChatGPT, but didn’t disclose financial terms at the time. Reporting by The Information suggested that as of January 2024, OpenAI was offering annual deals to publishers in the neighborhood of $1 million to $5 million—which would amount to tiny fractions of a penny per word for their content. (The FT declined to disclose the terms of its deal when asked by Fast Company.)

If that seems low to you, you’re not alone. The New York Times is suing OpenAI for damages, claiming its journalistic output has been used to train OpenAI’s tools without permission and in breach of copyright. While The Times hasn’t put a dollar figure on what it would require to settle the case, its initial filing suggests that OpenAI is on the hook for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” 

While The Times is holding out for more money through its lawsuit, the FT is just the latest to accede to a deal with OpenAI. But there’s a wider worry within the media industry that when big-name publishers agree to deals with companies like OpenAI, there’s little appetite—or money—left for smaller outlets.  

The fact that companies are going it alone to land deals is a change from conversations nearly a year ago, when leading publishers were reportedly trying to broker a coalition to get a stronger negotiating stance with OpenAI. Attitudes have changed, Fast Company understands, over concerns that such coalitions could be seen by anti-competition regulators as price-fixing.

“Big platforms are doing limited deals with a few of the biggest, most trusted news sources in a few big companies, including news agencies,” says Nic Newman, senior research associate at the Reuters Institute. “These deals are likely to further exacerbate the inequalities emerging in the wider ecosystem.” 

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