OpenAI and Time strike multiyear content deal to improve ChatGPT

OpenAI and Time magazine on Thursday announced a “multi-year content deal” that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of Time’s history.

The Microsoft-backed startup will be able to display Time’s content within its ChatGPT chatbot in response to user questions, according to a press release, and to use Time’s content “to enhance its products,” or, likely, to train its artificial intelligence models.

OpenAI’s use of Time’s content will feature a citation and link back to the original source, the release said.

As part of the deal, Time will have access to OpenAI’s technology in order to “develop new products for its audiences,” the release said.

The news follows a similar partnership announced by OpenAI and News Corp. in May, which allows OpenAI to access current and archived articles from News Corp.’s outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, The New York Post and more. Reddit also announced in May that it will partner with OpenAI, allowing the company to train its AI models on Reddit content.

The partnerships follow an increasing number of lawsuits against AI companies over alleged copyright infringement.

In December, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging intellectual property violations related to its journalistic content appearing in ChatGPT training data. The Times seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’s uniquely valuable works,” according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. OpenAI disagreed with the Times’ characterization of events.

In 2023, a group of prominent U.S. authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI alleging copyright infringement in using their work to train ChatGPT. In July, two authors filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that their books were used to train the company’s chatbot without their consent.