Seek deals or seek damages: Publishers divided over AI copyright debate

FRANCE 24 English

French daily and website Le Monde has become the latest publisher to strike a deal with OpenAI, allowing the San Francisco company to use its journalists' work to train artificial intelligence systems. To deal with claims that AI firms have plagiarised content scraped from the internet in order to build tools like ChatGPT, publishers have taken different approaches. Le Monde, the Associated Press and Axel Springer have all struck deals with OpenAI, while the New York Times and The Intercept are among those taking the company to court.Creators without the deep pockets of large publishers are feeling left out and exploited, as FRANCE 24's Peter O'Brien explains.  Visit our website: http://www.france24.com  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/France24_en

Transcript

00:00 Well, it's time now for some tech on the program.

00:02 In France's Le Monde newspaper has signed a deal with OpenAI, allowing the company to

00:07 use the paper's content to train its AI models.

00:11 It's the opposite approach to the New York Times, which sued OpenAI for copyright infringement

00:16 after its chatbot, ChatGPT, appeared to reproduce excerpts from the newspaper's archive.

00:22 For more on this, I'm joined by our technology editor, Peter O'Brien.

00:26 Peter, good to see you.

00:27 Hi, Alison.

00:28 Good to see you.

00:29 When you say seek deals or seek damages, it seems that that is now the choice that media

00:32 companies are facing.

00:33 Yeah, that's right.

00:35 It's almost a part two of publishers versus big tech.

00:39 We already had this dispute between publishers, regulators, and Google and Facebook, who eventually

00:46 have struck deals worth hundreds of millions of euros in the EU, Canada, and Australia

00:52 because they were using publishers' content on their feeds without necessarily permission

00:58 at first.

00:59 Now we're kind of seeing the same thing play out with AI.

01:02 If you look at the New York Times and The Intercept, they're some of the ones who have

01:05 decided to sue OpenAI, claiming that they're using their journalists' work without permission

01:12 for the data that's used to train their AI models.

01:14 It's not necessarily data that's immediately available, but it's stuff that's used to train

01:18 the models.

01:19 Now, others, like, as you say, Le Monde, the Associated Press, and Axel Springer, have

01:24 gone for a different approach.

01:25 They have actually signed deals with OpenAI, which allow, presumably in exchange for some

01:31 either monetary compensation or for their own content to be sort of promoted on AI platforms.

01:39 They've signed deals for their journalists' work to be used to train OpenAI's models.

01:44 Now, these AI companies say that they're just using publicly available data, which is fine.

01:50 I mean, Mira Murati, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, said this this week in

01:55 an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

01:57 It was a bit of a car crash.

01:58 You couldn't actually say which kinds of data were used specifically.

02:02 And it may seem like an obvious point, but if they're saying that the data is just publicly

02:06 available so they can just use all of it, well, why are they striking deals with publishers

02:11 then?

02:12 Yeah, no, clearly they know that that's not going to fly for a lot of companies.

02:15 It also makes me wonder what the journalists think about this deal that Le Monde has made.

02:18 Peter, what about people that don't have the deep pockets or the negotiating power that

02:22 big media companies have to make these kinds of deals?

02:25 Yeah, well, you touched upon it there.

02:26 I mean, freelance journalists, anyone who doesn't have those deep pockets and strike

02:30 these deals is feeling sort of left out.

02:33 I mean, we released a report this week about how France is throwing its weight behind AI.

02:39 And actually, we got a lot of illustrators and artists very angrily saying, well, actually,

02:44 our work has been plagiarized to use to train these models.

02:48 That's what they're alleging.

02:49 And now the government is just throwing us under the bus in order to try and become a

02:52 leader in AI.

02:54 And they're not the only ones who kind of feel left out in terms of how these models

02:57 are trained.

02:58 There's also content moderators, thousands of them, who look for a lot of harmful and

03:04 disturbing content to make sure it's not fed to AI systems.

03:08 Our Kenya correspondent, Olivia Bezo, released a report this week when she talked to one

03:13 of these continent moderators.

03:15 AI tools like ChatGBT work almost like magic, but there's no quick trick for building them.

03:26 Thousands of workers like Richard have spent months filtering toxic content out of the

03:31 data used to train open AI.

03:34 After reviewing scenes of child abuse and bestiality, he's been left traumatized.

03:40 You had to go through all of these statements.

03:44 You had to go through all this 250 content within a day.

03:51 And all of these are actually disturbing and traumatic content.

03:56 Richard and three other moderators decided it was time for change.

04:03 They filed a petition in parliament with the help of this lawyer.

04:07 Because this is new age work.

04:09 We've never experienced this.

04:10 We didn't prepare for this.

04:12 Our occupational laws don't even acknowledge harm to mental health as being occupational

04:17 illnesses.

04:18 So how do we change that?

04:20 And that's where the idea of petitioning parliament came from.

04:23 And you can find the full report on the France 24 website.

04:26 All right, Peter, thank you so much.

04:28 Always interesting stuff from you.

04:29 Makes me wonder if France 24 is going to try and sign a deal with an AI company.

04:32 I'm not going to speculate on that.

04:34 I don't know.

04:35 That'll be for another day.

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