By Gavin Boyle
The New York Times has agreed to a licensing deal with Amazon that would allow the company to use the newspaper’s articles for artificial intelligence products.
“This will include real-time display of summaries and short excerpts of Times content within Amazon products and services, such as Alexa, and training Amazon’s proprietary foundation models,” New York Times said, per Reuters.
The deal provides Amazon with the right to use all of New York Times’ content including New York Times Cooking and The Athletic — the company’s dedicated sports newspaper.
Many other news companies have signed similar deals in the past year, allowing AI companies to access their content and use it to train their models. In April, Washington Post signed a deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI to allow the chatbot access to its articles. In doing so, it joined News Corp, the Associated Press, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, LeMonde, Prisa Media, Time, Vox Media and Condé Nast as a list of Open AI partners.
Related: Washington Post to Allow ChatGPT to Include Its Articles in Responses
“We’re all in on meeting our audiences where they are,” Peter Elkins-Williams, the head of global partnerships at the Washington Post, said at the time the partnership was announced. “Ensuring ChatGPT users have our impactful reporting at their fingertips builds on our commitment to provide access where, how and when our audiences want it.”
New York Times’ deal, however, is different as the company has been extremely critical of AI in the past, particularly because of how it was seemingly trained on news articles that it did not have the rights to. In December 2023, the newspaper announced a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft claiming ChatGPT was illegally trained on millions of New York Times pieces.
“These tools were built with and continue to use independent journalism and content that is only available because we and our peers reported, edited, and fact-checked it at high cost and with considerable expertise,” the Times said, per CNBC. “Settled copyright law protects our journalism and content. If Microsoft and OpenAI want to use our work for commercial purposes, the law requires that they first obtain our permission. They have not done so.”
This lawsuit has continued to rage on, and it will serve as a landmark case to determine how AI models can be trained in the future. While it may not have seemed so before, the new deal with Amazon makes it clear that New York Times is not simply against AI; instead wants it to be created ethically, rather than illegally.
Read Next: OpenAI, Microsoft Sued by New York Times for Copyright Infringement
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