Within the newest battle between AI and the media, main Danish newspapers and TV channels threaten authorized motion OpenAI until the corporate compensates the nation’s press for allegedly utilizing their content material to coach their fashions.
“We wish rewards for our work [which] they used to coach their mannequin,” says Karen Rønde, CEO of the Danish Print Collective Administration Group (DPCMO), which represents 99 p.c of Danish media, together with state broadcaster DR and TV 2. Rønde says the DPCMO plans to sue. if a deal is just not reached subsequent yr.
AI has created a brand new entrance in copyright regulation after row from trials mentioned Microsoft-backed OpenAI was crawling information corporations’ web sites with out permission to coach its synthetic intelligence fashions. Shortly after these lawsuits, OpenAI entered right into a sequence of licensing agreements with main publishers, permitting the corporate to coach its future variations of ChatGPT on their content material. Monetary phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Now Danish media are attempting to drive OpenAI to collectively cut price with them – an uncommon tactic that, if profitable, may turn out to be a mannequin for different small international locations. OpenAI has to this point struck offers with publishers individually and has introduced content material partnerships with the Monetary Occasions and Atlantic, in addition to a German media conglomerate. Axel SpringerFrench newspaper Le Monde and Spanish group Prisa.
After assembly OpenAI on-line and in particular person earlier this yr, Rønde says she was left with the impression that Denmark was not a prime precedence. “It was clear that the main target was on the German deal, the French deal, the Spanish deal and, after all, the American deal,” she says. “There are such a lot of content material creators in all different territories, and now they’re left with nothing.”
Rønde despatched an electronic mail to OpenAI’s lawyer on the Dutch agency Brinkhof, informing them of Danish copyright regulation and saying she was awaiting a response. She mentioned she assumed OpenAI was already utilizing content material from Danish press websites as a result of the corporate did not inform her in any other case. Neither OpenAI nor Brinkhof responded to WIRED’s request for remark.
For Rønde, time is of the essence. It desires to strike a take care of OpenAI in addition to Google’s Gemini subsequent yr earlier than AI-powered chatbots and search engine opinions additional marginalizes writer web sites. “Maybe then this [will be] too late, and the worth of press publishers’ content material will probably be – in a single, two or three years – too low,” she says. “If we can’t enter right into a partnership settlement inside an affordable time-frame, we have to shield our rights.”
DPCMO was created in 2021 to assist Danish media negotiate with giant expertise corporations. “We would have liked to unite, in any other case we have been afraid that Denmark can be too small a rustic to be given precedence in discussions with the massive tech corporations,” says Rønde.
Final yr the group entered into preliminary licensing agreements with Microsoft Bing and Google to host content material from Danish publishers on the corporate’s engines like google. Though the agreements specified that publishers ought to obtain compensation from the 2 corporations, the offers didn’t agree on the quantity of compensation.