The weekend news brings a mix of interesting updates, starting with a major partnership between Condé Nast and OpenAI. Condé Nast, one of the largest and most high-profile publishers of magazines like The New Yorker and Vogue, announced a deal with OpenAI that will allow the AI giant to train ChatGPT on Condé Nast publications while benefiting from increased visibility for their stories. They also publish Wired, which is interesting because Wired was one of the first publications to take a very high-profile “never written by AI” stance.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
This week they announced a deal with OpenAI. It will allow OpenAI to train ChatGPT on Condé Nast publications, while Condé Nast will get their stories surfaced by ChatGPT.
TechCrunch’s report on the deal highlights that this and many similar deals are being negotiated without any involvement of the actual creators whose work the deals are being made over. There is also, of course, a diminishing return in these arrangements that makes them asymmetrical. OpenAI continues to get the massive benefit of constantly refined training. But the more partners it has (and it is building quite the portfolio), the less value there will be from being “surfaced,” as you will increasingly be just one of many. It’s almost as though no one actually learned how Google got its utter dominance over the online space.
Creatives continue to fight back, though, and this week saw the launch of another legal case. This time, authors are suing Anthropic, the company behind the Claude platform. The allegation is one of copyright infringement as one might expect. It is slightly complicated by the fact that the authors allege Anthropic used a vast amount of pirated works, including theirs. While they state that training without consent wouldn’t be OK even if it had been done with purchased copies, this does muddy the waters somewhat, and it isn’t necessarily clear what useful precedent would be set against general use in training without consent.
Turning to other tech platforms, YouTube has announced an integration with Shopify that will see it seek to compete with TikTok’s shop. This is potentially big news for anyone whose works appeal to the BookTube community, as it offers the possibility of selling direct while people are watching fan reviews, and opens exciting avenues for collaborations between creators and influencers. Watch this space.
