- OpenAI signed an agreement with Vogue magazine that grants it permission to display its content within OpenAI products and use it for AI training.
- The deal also extends to The New Yorker and Wired, both of which are owned by Conde Nast.
- The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed yet.
Condé Nast – the owner of Vogue Magazine – has signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI, agreeing to license its content. The deal extends to Vogue, The New Yorker, and Wired, all three of which are owned by Conde Nast.
The license will work in two ways.
- First, OpenAI will be allowed to use content from magazines and websites to train its AI models.
- Secondly, it will be allowed to display content from the magazine and websites within its own product.
The financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed yet but Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer addressed the agreement.
‘We’re committed to working with Conde Nast and other news publishers to ensure that as AI plays a larger role in news discovery and delivery, it maintains accuracy, integrity, and respect for quality reporting’ – Brad Lightcap
On Conde Nast’s side, the deal was addressed by its chief executive officer Roger Lynch and his statement makes it seem like the deal was mostly financially motivated on their side.
No additional information has been provided on what’s the cause of this “lost revenue”. So it is safe to assume that he is talking about the general hit that many media companies took after the unprecedented growth of AI over the last couple of years.
Why Is OpenAI Entering This Agreement?
The reason for Conde Nast entering this deal is abundantly clear but what could be OpenAI’s motive? Well, it’s actually quite simple.
Training an AI model requires a lot of data, more than what’s publicly available for free use. So a lot of companies including OpenAI resorted to authors, magazines, and websites to find training material. And we all know how that turned out.
Since none of these companies sought explicit consent from the content owner, they were hit by lawsuits, and rightfully so.
- In December 2023, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its biggest investor Microsoft for illegally using millions of its articles to train.
- In July 2023, comedian Sarah Silverman and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey filed a lawsuit against both OpenAI and Meta for illegally acquiring their work and using it as training material for its AI models.
- Most recently, AI startup Anthropic was hit by a class action lawsuit by a group of authors for using pirated versions of their books in training its AI models.
So it looks like OpenAI has decided it’s done dealing with lawsuits and has taken the legal way out which is to enter an agreement with the websites/magazines before using their work. A similar agreement also happened with Time Magazine, the Financial Times, and the Associated Press.
Many other top leaders such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the BBC continue to resist AI firms from using their content. In fact, they have also taken legal action to prevent such infringement.
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Krishi Chowdhary Journalist 
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