OpenAI teams up with Vox Media, publisher of The Atlantic and The Verge

This week saw the continuation of valuable content partnerships between OpenAI and major media publishers.

Today, both AtlanticAmerican long-established magazine and digital media giant Vox Media (The Verge, Vox.com, New York MagazineA number of media outlets, including Yahoo! Academia, Thrillist, and SB Nation, have partnered with the makers of ChatGPT to license their publications’ content to be included in chatbot responses, while OpenAI is developing large-scale language models (LLMs) and multimedia AI models ( GPT-4o, sky) upon.

(I used to work for both companies.)

Financial details of the deal were not immediately disclosed, but the companies said they would receive access to OpenAI’s technology, in addition to a licensing fee to give OpenAI access to their content and data.

The news comes less than a week after OpenAI announced a similar partnership with newspaper and magazine publisher News Corp. The Wall Street Journal, New York Postand other retailers in the U.S. and internationally.

Some journalists, including Jessica Lessin, founder and CEO, information, I wrote in The Atlantic just a few days ago. — Publishers have criticized OpenAI for giving them access to valuable content too quickly, but things seem to be getting worse for many publishers.

Read Vox Media President Pam Wasserstein’s statement on the news below:

Hey, guys,

Today, I’m happy to announce that Vox Media has partnered with OpenAI, and I wanted to take this opportunity to explain the agreement in the context of how we’re working on AI more broadly.

The roadmap we set out across the company to support reader loyalty and editorial differentiation becomes even more important in the generative AI era. To compete in an environment where platforms are trying to take away and commodify baseline factual information, we need to be indispensable to our readers and build meaningful relationships with them (and, amusingly, present nonsense as fact, a completely predictable outcome of a strategy that doesn’t fully value the contributions of responsible journalism). We also need to create new opportunities for readers to discover our brand in different contexts as consumer behavior evolves. To achieve these goals, as always, the unique elements that most distinguish Vox Media and its editorial brand—our authority and judgment, our voice, our reporting, our valuable and entertaining content, our community, our creative solutions for our partners, and the trust of our readers that we’ve earned—will be essential to us.

This is a rapidly evolving field, and one we approach with enthusiasm and care. There are ways to accelerate our ambitions with these powerful tools, and it’s an exciting opportunity. But we’re also cautious. Human judgment and creativity are essential to our business, as are our intellectual property.

We want to share with you the framework that guides our approach to using AI-driven technology at Vox Media. In this area, we’re focused across the company on:

We deliver innovation on behalf of our viewers and customers.

Vox Media originated from building better media products, and embracing technology is a key hallmark of our company. We’ve already developed AI-enabled services that deliver valuable experiences to our viewers and advertising partners, such as The Strategist’s Gift Scout (https://nymag.com/strategist/gift-scout.html) and features in our first-party data platform, Forte.

Enhance human creativity with assistive tools.

We’re currently using AI in a variety of ways across the company to improve our work processes. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to try out these tools within the confines of your existing editorial and engineering guidance. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sending out company-wide policies to guide our use of AI in other departments, as well as a survey to better understand how we all use AI. In the meantime, if you have questions about whether or how to use AI tools, please reach out to your team leads.

Expanding and protecting the value of our work and intellectual property (IP)

Vox Media’s published works are protected by copyright law and our website’s Terms of Use. We believe that robots scraping our site to train AI models or produce output that plagiarizes our content without Vox Media’s permission violates both copyright law and our Terms of Use. Clear contractual rules and appropriate compensation for use of Vox Media’s published content are as important in AI as in other contexts. We continue to evaluate our options in this area, including legal and public policy solutions and additional partnerships, to protect our published works and a robust and trustworthy news media ecosystem.

Vox Media’s partnership with OpenAI fits into this framework in the following ways:
• Ensuring that Vox Media is compensated for OpenAI’s use of Vox Media’s publicly-available content, which continues to set an important precedent for our industry.
• Helping Vox Media reach ChatGPT’s 100 million users will increase brand awareness while marketing in the context of new audience development.
• Protect our intellectual property by requiring attribution of our brand when ChatGPT displays or references our published work, limiting the summary that can be displayed, and including a link to our site.
• Place Vox Media at the forefront of certain OpenAI products and establish terms under which the two companies can work together to leverage OpenAI’s technology to develop innovative products for Vox Media’s consumers and advertising partners.

A press release announcing the transaction will be issued shortly.

“We are proud that this agreement is part of a broader effort to strengthen and expand Vox Media’s work as AI continues to transform how we use the internet, how we gather and receive information, and how we are entertained and consume entertainment. As we continue to innovate with this technology, we will continue to ensure that the important work we do is valued and protected.”
Now, more than ever, our trustworthy journalism, community and storytelling are needed — our work has never been more important.