[HN Gopher] Conde Nast Signs Deal with OpenAI
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Conde Nast Signs Deal with OpenAI
Author : spenvo
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-08-20 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| perks_12 wrote:
| This is nothing but appeasement. Publishers at large won't know
| what hit them once searchgpt drops. The written internet is
| doomed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Publishers at large won 't know what hit them once searchgpt
| drops_
|
| A multi-billion dollar cheque? Voluntarily relinquished or via
| a settlement?
| freediver wrote:
| > The written internet is doomed.
|
| As someone who used searchgpt and is also building a competing
| product, I can say this is simply not going to be the case. LLM
| assisted search leaves just too much to be desired and there is
| no future in which this is the primary way for humans to
| consume information. It needs to be augmented with credible
| sources of information or rather using LLMs only makes sense
| once you have access to credible source information in the
| first place, and want to have an augmented version of the
| information you consume (and are happy with non discrete
| outcomes).
| gregw134 wrote:
| Are you allowed to tell us about SearchGPT, and what you
| like/dislike about it?
| freediver wrote:
| Its use case is limited and even in those cases where is it
| well suited, you have to be ready that its purpose is to at
| best inform, not educate.
| leereeves wrote:
| If the written internet is doomed, what will searchgpt train on
| in the future?
|
| In that scenario, in a few years it will be out of date and
| doomed too.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > If the written internet is doomed, what will searchgpt
| train on in the future?
|
| It will train on what people say in their cellphones or in
| front of their Smart TVs or in their deeply connected cars.
| If data is being transmitted after encryption (within a
| closed and undocumented chip) to a server in a country that
| doesn't cooperate with authorities, then the same data is
| pseudo-anonymized and bought back on a different channel,
| that will make very hard to stop it.
| labster wrote:
| It's true. Why turn to the mainstream media when GPT can just
| hallucinate the news that I want to hear?
| time-less-ness wrote:
| The best fabricated and entirely hallucinated news comes from
| the mainstream. AI-generated content is too logical and
| internally-consistent to be real.
| Vayu wrote:
| I'd argue that dead internet theory actually provides more
| merit to places like news where they go through rounds of
| editorial processes. That being said, there're a lot of
| generated news platforms so it'll be up to the user to decide
| on who they trust.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > The written internet is doomed.
|
| And the video internet is under ever-increasing
| enshittification.-
| liveoneggs wrote:
| they can sign this deal with the devil and survive to fight
| another day or get eaten by him anyway
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Maybe, for some of their magazines (Vogue, say).
|
| For CN Traveler, I'm pretty sure that readers want an actual
| picture of the interior of the new hotel, not an AI rendering
| of something that as yet has few actual pictures to train the
| model on.
|
| (For that matter, Vogue might have that same thing going on
| with fashion.)
| BadHumans wrote:
| I feel that all of these deals are an implicit acknowledgement
| that what OpenAI and all of these companies did training on
| everyone's' content and data was illegal. If you're so certain
| that what you did was fine and fair use then why go through the
| trouble of spending all this money on licensing deals? Unless
| they just think that dealing with all of the lawsuits would cost
| more than just paying people to go away.
| drooby wrote:
| Perhaps because that is still being disputed in court? The
| outcome is unknown and they are making a defensive play?
|
| If it turns out they shouldn't have done that, then when the
| dust settles they will be ahead of the competitors that didn't
| sign deals.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| No it's a simple net present cost calculation. Its cheaper than
| continued litigation and ensures they maintain access in future
| (rather than the publisher in question starts blocking their
| web crawlers).
|
| Once they've got deals with the few really big players, the
| rest of the industry falls into line (the smaller guys don't
| have the financial means to out-litigate or block OpenAI).
| jstummbillig wrote:
| The difference between "ack it was illegal" and "certain it was
| fine" and how easily you skip over it.
|
| Trying to make things better is good and requires no admittance
| of guilt.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've thought of it as more of a they didn't have money to
| license at first, then the models got decent enough for them
| to charge for use, now they are trying to avoid getting the
| models shut down for violations by making deals. Too bad only
| the large players that got scraped will have these deals made
| while the smaller players are left without
| HeavenFox wrote:
| The content directly obtained from the source would also likely
| be cleaner, and even if it's settled that scraping and training
| is legal, the cost savings in data cleaning could still warrant
| a paid partnership.
| stranded22 wrote:
| Surely it is about not allowing others to have access to the
| data...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Are you suggesting that OpenAI made a deal that will mean
| Googs/MS/others will now not be able to license the same
| content?
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| These publishers are lucky to get a deal from Western AI
| companies. I doubt Chinese AI companies will give a f'ck. In
| the age of China-US AI competition, this will be one advantage
| for Chinese AI companies.
| c1sc0 wrote:
| Arguably what they win in input training cost they may lose
| in output censorship cost? But then again the line between
| Western "Guardrails" and Eastern "Censorship" isn't all that
| clear.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| It's just the next TikTok/Douyin. One version for their
| country, another for the rest of the world.
| bloppe wrote:
| Nobody that's familiar with copyright precedent seriously
| thinks _training_ on copyrighted data is illegal. What 's
| illegal is simply reproducing the copyrighted content for
| others. See Google Books for an interesting precedent. Google
| still scans every book ever written without paying licensing
| fees. They just can't legally make all those scans freely
| available to all.
|
| Clearly, some of the responses GPT gives to users have
| infringed training data copyright, but the majority of their
| responses do not. They basically have 3 options:
|
| 1. Figure out how to engineer an LLM so that it reliably avoids
| "unfair" use of copyrighted content. "Fair use" is a legal
| doctrine with no rigorous definition, so this would be very
| difficult even if they had a clue where to start. I wouldn't
| hold my breath for this.
|
| 2. They can continue without any licensing, and field copyright
| lawsuits on a case-by-case basis for each individual prompt and
| response. That would be a logistical nightmare for the courts,
| plaintiffs, and defendant alike. It would certainly stress test
| the whole system, possibly result in knee jerk legislation that
| OAI may not like, or simply bury them in legal fees if
| infringement is common enough (which is not entirely clear
| yet).
|
| 3. They can strike deals, eliminating legal uncertainty and
| allowing them to plow ahead with reproducing copyrighted
| content without worries, while also getting other goodies like
| exclusivity deals at the same time.
|
| Seems like a no brainer to me
| fredgrott wrote:
| Its a little more nuance that as otherwise archive or library
| system would still be in business..
| bloppe wrote:
| Libraries and archives rely on first sale doctrine, which
| doesn't apply to digital copies, only physical ones.
| ben_w wrote:
| Hypothetically, because the deal is cheaper than fighting the
| case.
|
| (In practice, being not a lawyer, I have no idea how even
| Google's search indexing is legal, nor where the boundaries are
| between the legal bit vs. the times they got in trouble for
| indexing newspapers and at least one separate case about
| images).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Conde Nast is massive with a massive back catalog of material
| that is not online or is behind paywall.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I don't understand the underlying mechanisms that will allow for
| these new partnerships to work, but reading bits like "ensuring
| proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual
| property,", do make wonder how said "compensation" is going to be
| calculated, and distributed.
|
| Assets like New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit (all
| mentioned in the article), do come with editorial lines, perhaps
| editorial lines I do not agree with, so how is their content
| going to be injected in my search results/gpt answers? Is it
| going to be an organic affair such as:
|
| - (Me) "How many times a year shall I renew my socks?"
|
| - "That's and amazing question! According to journal X ... (blah
| blah blah, probably a good answer)" (maybe add some notes for a
| copyrighted article with a link)
|
| Or it going to turn into:
|
| - (Same question)
|
| - "The far-right movement seems to be skipping sock renewal
| policies, but contrary to this, brown socks are trending in
| Europe this coming summer, don't miss this chance to buy yours
| at: website.com"
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Worth pointing out that brown shirts (and matching socks
| hopefully) were a very far right symbol probably pink or
| rainbow if you're going for anti Nazi look
| Spivak wrote:
| And for anyone who's wondering why
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
| awkward wrote:
| There's no way to create media that doesn't have an editorial
| line. LLM generated media has an editorial line, in terms of
| what gets filtered, what gets injected into prompts, and what
| biases exist in the data. Attribution of work and allowing the
| reader to decide their level of trust in the source is the only
| known defense.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| >I don't understand the underlying mechanisms that will allow
| for these new partnerships to work, but reading bits like
| "ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our
| intellectual property,"
|
| Possibly some European style music licensing model, but for
| articles. PRS for example[1] in the UK is a copyright
| collective. Bars, clubs, supermarkets etc pay a fee to the
| organisation to sign up to it, and can play pretty much any
| music in return. The PRS body distributes what it decides is an
| equitable distribution to artists & labels. For most of PRS'
| history, there was very little science in determining who had
| the most plays, but everyone seemed to agree with the
| distribution.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRS_for_Music
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Bars, clubs, supermarkets etc pay a fee to the organisation
| to sign up to it, and can play pretty much any music in
| return._
|
| I worked for a company that was signed up for a similar
| service in the United States.
|
| We had a blanket license for music, for which we paid a
| little over $1 million each year. This was around 2001.
|
| A couple of times a year, we'd pull an intern aside and his
| job for the entire day was to sit there with a pencil and
| steno pad and write down all the music we used. That was
| typed into a report and sent to the licensing company which
| determined how much each artist would get paid.
|
| These days, with advances in music recognition technology,
| it's probably all very automated and more thorough.
| goles wrote:
| https://archive.is/kNdE0
|
| OpenAI announcement - https://openai.com/index/conde-nast/
| pmdr wrote:
| I can't put my finger on it just yet, but I have a feeling the
| average content creator isn't going to benefit from all this
| deal-making.
| omega3 wrote:
| Hard to see what the benefit to the customers is.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| shareholder value
| redbell wrote:
| > The average content creator isn't going to benefit..
|
| A couple of months ago, when the news about "Reddit to sell its
| user-generated content to Google," a redditor asks the
| community to _start generating false comments_ so the data
| would be of bad quality to train the models on. They start
| brainstorming some very funny comments that go something like:
| "Blue Whale is the largest fish", "WW II started in 1943", You
| name it..
| pmdr wrote:
| It might not prove to be that effective. I think common
| knowledge has been reinforced by hundreds of other sources
| that it's hard to pollute it. Specific, expert-level
| knowledge deriving from one's experience is more scarce and
| thus more valuable. If redditors run around faking that, then
| it could feed the models bad data. But might also reflect
| poorly on the author should reputation be at stake.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| There are already examples of content farms generating
| websites based off of bad Reddit data. So other websites
| can start to pollute the model as well as they get crawled
| along with the primary misinformation.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Yeah but if your cheese keeps sliding off your pizza, you
| can add some glue like elmer's glue to thicken it up.
|
| Or so google's AI responses pulled from Reddit. If you give
| enough people a hot microphone to a large enough audience,
| some people are going to say some obscene, untrue, and
| funny stuff. Maybe that's 1 in 10. Maybe that's 1 in a
| 100,000. Reddit karma is cheap.
| johnhenry wrote:
| > Conde Nast and OpenAI have struck a multi-year deal that will
| allow the AI giant to use content from the media giant's roster
| of properties--which includes the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair,
| Bon Appetit, and, yes, WIRED.
|
| I'm disappointed by the fact that this disclaimer isn't more
| explicit.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Smells like a pre-emptive settlement to me.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Someone unleashed some sort of AI on UberEats the other day
| apparently, because I was looking for Chinese food and found
| entire menus filled with nonsensical descriptions. Did you know
| that Dan Dan noodles, Orange Chicken, and Mei Fun noodles are all
| made with wonton wrappers and cream cheese? Me neither!
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is the robot.txt-ification of entrenching OpenAI.
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