OpenAI said it’s talking to dozens of publishers about striking deals to license their articles, a broader effort than was previously known as the startup looks for content to train its artificial intelligence models.
“We are in the middle of many negotiations and discussions with many publishers. They are active. They are very positive. They’re progressing well,” Tom Rubin, OpenAI’s chief of intellectual property and content, told Bloomberg News. “You’ve seen deals announced, and there will be more in the future.”
OpenAI recently inked a multiyear licensing deal with Politico’s parent company Axel Springer SE for tens of millions of dollars, a person familiar with the matter previously told Bloomberg. In July, OpenAI announced an agreement with The Associated Press for an undisclosed amount. These deals are key to OpenAI’s future as it’s balancing the need for updated, accurate data to build its models with growing scrutiny about where that data is sourced from.
But last week, one of the companies it had been in talks with, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for using the publication’s articles without permission.
The suit poses an existential challenge to OpenAI’s business. If the Times wins the case, OpenAI may not only owe billions of dollars, but could also be forced to destroy any of its training data that includes work from the Times, a costly and complicated task. More immediately, however, the lawsuit complicates OpenAI’s deal-making efforts with the media industry.
“The current situation is vastly different than the situations that the publishers faced in the past with search engines and social media,” Rubin said. “Here, the content is used for training a model. It’s not used to reproduce the content. It’s not used to replace the content.”
The Times, however, disagrees with OpenAI’s stance, arguing that ChatGPT is flat out copying its journalists’ work without paying for it. In its lawsuit, the publisher showed examples in which ChatGPT spit out entire paragraphs of nearly verbatim text from The New York Times (although some have pointed out that in certain examples, it was specifically prompting ChatGPT to reproduce Times content). The publisher argues that’s proof OpenAI used New York Times data.
“If Microsoft and OpenAI want to use our work for commercial purposes, the law requires that they first obtain our permission,” The New York Times said in a statement. “They have not done so.”
When it appears to confirm a 40-year-old Democratic conspiracy theory.
Peter Baker, the Times’ chief White House correspondent, published Saturday a bombshell report, “A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-Election.”
It was indeed merely one man’s story.
An 85-year-old Democrat, Ben Barnes, claims to have personal knowledge of efforts by Ronald Reagan allies to delay the release of US hostages from Iran until after the 1980 election.
A reader has to plough through 10 paragraphs of this sensational story before encountering a concession that “Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic.”
But not to fear — Baker assures us Barnes “has no obvious reason to make up the story.”
Suppose an octogenarian Republican from Arkansas comes forward tomorrow to provide a personal account of Bill Clinton’s involvement in drug trafficking in the 1980s, a notion long promoted in certain GOP circles.
No corroboration, just his word for it.
In all the worlds of the widest cinematic multiverse imaginable, is there any in which the Times would publish such a piece?
The new standard for “news that’s fit to print” is when a source “has no obvious reason to make up the story.”
As long as that source is from the right party.
People less sophisticated than a Times White House correspondent might classify partisanship as an obvious motive.
Yet Baker tells readers Barnes was afraid of how his fellow Democrats would react to his claims.
Come again? Nothing in Baker’s report explains this counterintuitive assertion.
The myth that Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 election because Reagan committed a misdeed tantamount to treason is in fact an enduringly popular conspiracy theory among liberals.
As Baker recounts, a Democratic-controlled Congress investigated the story in the 1980s but was unable to prove it.
A former Carter administration official published a book “advancing the theory” (as Baker writes) in 1991, promoting it with a “guest essay” in — where else? — The New York Times.
Baker, in a remarkable line, bolster’s Barnes’ credibility by telling us what he is not: “Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility” like certain earlier proponents of the “October surprise” storyline.
Instead Barnes is a career Democratic politician who was once the protégé of Texas Gov. John Connally.
By 1980 Connally had become a Republican, and he sought the GOP presidential nomination that year but lost to Reagan.
Barnes remained close to Connally, however, and accompanied him on trips around the Middle East that summer.
Barnes says Connally told Arab leaders to send a message to Iran urging the Shi’ite revolutionaries to keep their American hostages until after the election.
This would prolong a crisis that weakened Carter, and a newly elected President Reagan would look kindly on Tehran in return.
Barnes has waited until anyone who might contradict his story is dead.
Connally died in 1993, and William Casey, the Reagan campaign manager and later CIA director to whom Connally supposedly reported on return from his Middle East excursions, died in 1987.
In the absence of testimony from anyone who could authenticate Barnes’ account, Baker pads the narrative by citing four men who have no direct knowledge about Barnes’ claims but who did hear the tale from Barnes himself over the years.
Although none is identified as a Democrat, three of the four have ties to Lyndon Johnson and his legacy.
Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 presidential election resoundingly.
He carried only six states and the District of Columbia.
He finished 9.8 points behind Ronald Reagan in the popular vote.
With numbers like that, a partisan denial of election results has to go beyond questioning returns from individual districts or states.
To discredit Reagan’s victory, and excuse Carter for the multitude of failures that led to his defeat, requires a different kind of conspiracy theory.
One that projects the taint of Iran-Contra back to Reagan before he even became president, and redeems Carter for the greatest shame of his presidency, is irresistibly seductive to liberals.
Even if the whole thing comes down to one politician’s word.
Journalists write the first draft of history and in this case perhaps the second or third as well.
As a profession, academic historians are hardly less biased than the legacy media in their preference for one of our major parties.
When liberals boast of being on the right side of history, it does not mean time has proved them right.
It means their conspiracy theories and inadequately sourced stories have passed for truth in the textbooks and paper of record.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
Diary of disturbing disinformation and dangerous delusions
This slur:
“Is it as obvious as it seems that domestic violent extremists are an important part of the voting coalition on the right?”
— MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Tuesday — the day before a left-wing nut planned to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh
We say: Don’t write off Wallace’s reality-free slur as mere bad timing. With the Justice Department labeling parents “domestic terrorists” and the left hyping (and distorting) fringe “white replacement theory” (while ignoring left-wing extremists, antifa, etc.), partisans like Wallace really do see right-wing terrorists around every corner.
This comparison:
“Watergate was a burglary of Democratic party offices. Nobody died. The violent assault on Capitol Hill ultimately claimed seven lives.”
We say: The truth? Capitol rioters didn’t kill a single person. Not one. Yes, a Trump supporter was fatally shot . . . by a Capitol Police officer. Two protesters died of natural causes, and another OD’d. The next day, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick also died of natural causes, though for months left-leaning outlets and even President Joe Biden himself claimed protesters killed him. Two other officers later committed suicide. Was the breach of the Capitol an abhorrent stain on the democratic process, involving physical confrontations and terrorizing lawmakers? Absolutely. But isn’t that bad enough? Attempts to milk it for political gain by falsely painting protesters as killers are disgusting in their own right.
Spot the difference:
We say: Oops. Back in November 2020, The Washington Post cited experts who pooh-poohed conservatives’ warnings about a then-looming spike in gas prices under President Joe Biden. Looks like the experts, and the WaPo, were a tad . . . off, as a New York Post report Monday shows.
This story:
We say: Since when is a network’s news lineup a front-page story? Fox News said its sister station, Fox Business, would cover the Democrats’ Capitol-riot hearing, while its prime-time hosts would address it “as news warrants.” That wasn’t good enough for the Dems’ “paper of record”: It notes that other (left-leaning) networks will devote “wall-to-wall” coverage to the hearing and tries to shame Fox for not climbing aboard. Yet the mass coverage is part of a partisan show staged by Dems in Congress; networks have every right to decide how they want to cover that. The Times, however, thinks viewers should have no options. Meanwhile, the Gray Lady ran its report on a left-winger’s plot to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on . . . page A20. Is there any doubt about its agenda?
This tweet:
We say: After a man was caught Wednesday outside Justice Kavanaugh’s home plotting to kill him, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates flatly denied that former Press Secretary Jen Psaki encouraged protests near the jurists’ personal residences in response to the leak of a draft opinion on Roe v. Wade. Yet a transcript Bates himself posted shows Psaki clearly saying, “We certainly continue to encourage [protests] outside of judges’ homes, and that’s the president’s position.” Sure, she meant peaceful protests, but directing protesters to officials’ residences invites trouble, as the plan to kill Kavanaugh plainly shows.
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