Amazon and The New York Times have agreed to a new deal in which the newspaper’s editorial content will be licensed by the tech giant for use on its artificial intelligence platforms.
The multi-year licensing agreement will bring Times editorial content “to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the Times said in a news release on Thursday. Content will include “real-time display of summaries and short excerpts” of content such as news articles and material from NYT Cooking (food and cooking) and The Athletic (sports).
Amazon could also use Times original content in the Alexa software on its smart speakers and to train its proprietary AI models.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. An Amazon spokesperson directed GeekWire to the Times news release.
The generative-AI focused licensing arrangement is a first for the Times.
The New York Times Co. filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against both OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December 2023, accusing the tech companies of “using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”
The suit alleges that the companies wrongly used vast amounts of copyrighted material from the newspaper to train the large language models that power ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence models.
A federal judge rejected parts of OpenAI and Microsoft’s motion to dismiss the suit in April, writing that the Times’ produced “numerous” and “widely publicized” examples of ChatGPT producing material from its articles.
OpenAI has licensing deals with other publishers, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and NewsCorp, according to TechCrunch.
“The [Amazon] deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief executive of the Times, said in a note to staff. “It aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights.”
Read the full article here
