Reed’s view
The Disney–OpenAI licensing deal is the latest example of a media company making a savvy move in the fog of AI economics — something also true for quality news and information.
The important question is, what kind of content creation will the AI economy support? As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince argues, this is a chance to right some of the clickbait wrongs of the internet.
“I’m hopeful that we get a lot more really interesting, long-form, knowledge-generating content, which is what we all want,” he said recently on the Hard Fork podcast.
But there are a lot of smart people who warn against media companies — especially news organizations — giving away the farm in these deals. They include my former boss, Jessica Lessin, who points out her industry got screwed by big tech companies in the Web 2.0 era.
But Web 2.0 companies didn’t need quality content, and tech companies found they could get clickbait without paying much of anything. When people use AI chatbots, on the other hand, they want reliable answers rooted in trustworthy content. AI companies know this. Erroneous or unpredictable responses are an existential threat to the industry.
That difference is why these content deals should happen as lump-sum, multiyear agreements, rather than programmatic structures that automate compensation on individual pieces of content.
People always figure out how to game the algorithm, and the losers are the ones who put the most resources into content creation. The right structure that values an entire body of work or catalog is more important than the dollar figures, at least in the beginning. If both sides get value out of it, the price will go up over time.
In this article:
Room for Disagreement
Alex Reisner, writing for the Atlantic, argues AI could end publishing altogether.
There are signs that AI companies believe publishers are no longer needed. In December, at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked how writers should feel about their work being used for AI training. “I think we do need a new deal, standard, protocol, whatever you want to call it, for how creators are going to get rewarded.” He described an “opt-in” regime where an author could receive “micropayments” when their name, likeness, and style were used. But this could not be further from OpenAI’s current practice, in which products are already being used to imitate the styles of artists and writers, without compensation or even an effective opt-out.
Notable
- The director of SAG-AFTRA, one of the most powerful unions representing actors and people working in the creative industries, told the BBC those in entertainment are “incredibly worried” about the implications of the Disney-OpenAI agreement.