OpenAI in talks with CNN, Fox and Time for content licensing

Generative intelligence app ChatGPT's parent OpenAI is in talks with media firms CNN, Fox Corp. and Time for licensing their work, reports suggest citing people familiar with the matter.

The development comes as the New York Times sued the 2015-found company in December, accusing it of copyright infringement using millions of articles to train AI technologies like the ChatGPT chatbot.

OpenAI, which describes itself as an AI research and deployment firm, competes with The Times as a source of reliable information along with other such chatbots, as per the lawsuit.

Following the infringement charges by the American daily, OpenAI is looking to license articles from Warner Bros. Discovery Inc's CNN to train ChatGPT.

The latest development also includes the artificial intelligence startup wanting to feature CNN's content in its products, the Bloomberg report said.

OpenAI is financially backed by Microsoft, which launched ChatGPT in Bing for search assistance using generative technologies. The two firms are facing multiple lawsuits accusing them of using copyrighted works for training artificial-intelligence (AI) products.

The latest case against the technology companies has been filed in the Manhattan federal court by nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage.

The authors accuse the companies of misusing their work to train the AI models.

OpenAI did not issue a statement on the particular development, but in a Monday blogpost specified that its partnerships with news organisations to train its technologies was ‘fair use under the law.’

The artificial intelligence maker, which took the world by storm in 2022 after launching generative solutions for anything from code to mails and recipes, has led to job cuts globally in white-collar roles. While some suggest it cuts redundant tasks and gives everyone a personal assistant, the consequences of it replacing human roles and intelligence has not been ruled out.

OpenAI said it collaborated with news organisations and had struck partnerships with some of them, including The Associated Press, which makes it legally eligible to use copyrighted works for training its technologies. 

(With Reuters Inputs)