Since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, media executives have debated how to approach generative artificial intelligence firms, which scrape an enormous amount of publicly available information to power chat bots that can produce copy or news article-like material within seconds.
Many big publishers decided the best course of action, for now, was to take a big payout from OpenAI in exchange for the tech giant ingesting their content. At least that way, the thinking goes, publishers are getting some guaranteed payment from AI disrupting the way the open web works, even if the future of the Google-dominated internet advertising space remains in question.
Dotdash Meredith, the owner of People, Better Homes & Gardens and InStyle, disclosed in a November quarterly earnings report that those payments from its OpenAI licensing deal amounted to $16 million annually.
News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, has framed its deal with the Sam Altman-run tech company as a landmark agreement. The publisher’s CEO Robert Thomson, while declining to reveal the figure, said in an earnings call in November that cash from its OpenAI licensing deal is “having an impact in the news media section. There’s no doubt about that as in subsequent quarters. And it is also a part now of the revenue and profit profile of Dow Jones.”
Other publishers, including Vogue and The New Yorker owner Condé Nast as well as Time magazine, The Atlantic, Axel Springer, The Financial Times and Vox Media have all inked similar deals that have been described as being a win-win for the companies involved (and, it appears in some cases, allow an out after a couple years to renegotiate).
The New York Times, however, took a different tack and sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in late December 2023 “after it discovered that Defendants were using Times content without permission to develop their models and tools,” its filing stated. The suit states it took the legal action “to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
As that legal battle unfolds, the Times has disclosed what the full year total of AI legal bills has been. The newspaper company said it spent $10.8 million on costs associated with generative artificial intelligence litigation in 2024, according to its quarterly earnings filing on Wednesday.
The Times, buoyed by its 11 million-plus paid subscribers to its newspaper and suite of products, is one of the few journalistic entities that can afford to engage in yearslong litigation with Big Tech. (Private equity has also joined the legal fray, as Alden Global Capital, now the owner of the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News after buying the struggling Tribune Publishing group in 2021, also sued OpenAI in April.)
The Times‘ publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, doesn’t appear to have commented directly on the ongoing litigation but early last year cast the debate about AI in terms of a principled stand, even if the evolving tech has potential to help reporters as well. “We can’t allow a world in which the right of a news organisation to be paid for the work that spends money, and takes time and care and often risks to create, disappears,” Sulzberger told the Reuters Institute at the time. “We cannot allow a world where the right for a news organisation to have a direct relationship with the audience for that very work disappears.”
OpenAI’s Altman, who appeared at a Times Dealbook summit in conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin in December, has rejected that stance. “I don’t believe in showing up in someone else’s house as a guest and being rude,” he remarked to Ross Sorkin, “But I will say I think The New York Times is on the wrong side of history in many ways.”