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A Devil’s Bargain With OpenAI

The Atlantic via MSN: The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, announced in an internal email that the company has entered into a business partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (The news was made public via a press release shortly thereafter.) Editorial content from this publication will soon be directly referenced in response to queries in OpenAI products. In practice, this means that users of ChatGPT, say, might type in a question and receive an answer that briefly quotes an Atlantic story; according to Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s senior vice president of communications, it will be accompanied by a citation and a link to the original source. Other companies, such as Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and Politico, have made similar arrangements…Generative AI has not exactly felt like a friend to the news industry, given that it is trained on loads of material without permission from those who made it in the first place. It also enables the distribution of convincing fake media, not to mention AI-generated child-sexual-abuse material. The rapacious growth of the technology has also dovetailed with a profoundly bleak time for journalism, as several thousand people have lost their jobs in this industry over just the past year and a half. Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has behaved in an erratic, ethically questionable manner, seemingly casting caution aside in search of scale. To put it charitably, it’s an unlikely hero swooping in with bags of money…”

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