Big newspapers want a piece of the profits from Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies that use their content to train their systems.
Tech companies like OpenAI have used news articles and online content to teach their AI, but now, news publishers want to be paid.
Over 500 news organizations, including the New York Times and Reuters, have blocked their content from being used to train popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
They're discussing payment deals so chatbots can provide links to their news stories which would benefit the newspapers by bringing in money and more website visitors.
Other data sources are also looking to get paid.
Reddit is thinking about charging AI companies for its data or hiding its content behind a login page.
Elon Musk started charging $42,000 for access to Twitter posts that were once free for researchers because he believed AI companies were using the data illegally.
Copyright lawsuits are mounting against leading AI companies and trade groups want to negotiate collectively with tech firms.
OpenAI is now talking to newspapers possibly to strike deals before legal battles determine if tech companies have a clear obligation to pay for content.
OpenAI confirmed it's in discussions with news publishers but stated that the talks are about future content access, not past training data.
Generative AI is a booming industry, with nearly $16 billion invested in it in the first three quarters of 2023.
It's expensive to develop this technology, with high costs for hardware, computing power, and more.
News publishers and others see this as a crucial issue for their survival as AI transforms how people interact with the internet.
