The first agreements with the major players in artificial intelligence are revealed: the newspaper Le Monde announced yesterday that it had entered into a partnership agreement with OpenAI to allow the creator of ChatGPT to use the articles and texts produced by the newspaper as a basis reference in French.
This agreement is “the first between a French media outlet and a player in this emerging industry,” announce Louis Dreyfus and Jérôme Fenoglio, respectively chairman of the board and director of Le Monde, in a column.
The agreement concluded with OpenAI aims firstly to feed the language model marketed by the American company, GPT, by offering it the possibility of indexing and analyzing the articles produced by the editorial staff of the world, but also by enriching its answers with the information contained in the articles. The daily’s management nevertheless specifies that the agreement will aim to “ensure that references to articles in Le Monde are highlighted and that they are systematically made with a logo, a hypertext link and the title of the article(s).”
In return for this access offered to its production, Le Monde explains that it has obtained that its teams can “rely on OpenAI technologies to develop projects or functionalities using AI”. The agreement will also provide on a daily basis “a significant source of additional, multi-annual income, which includes a share of neighboring rights”, the exact amount of which has not been revealed.
Prevention is better than cure
In parallel with this opening to OpenAI, the editorial staff of Le Monde adopted a charter aimed at regulating the uses of artificial intelligence tools within the editorial staff. This aims to remind us that artificial intelligence “cannot replace humans in journalistic productions and achievements” and ensures, for example, that all projects using AI tools must clearly report this to the drive. The charter also sets certain limits; the daily newspaper, for example, prohibits the use of images generated by artificial intelligence.
The editorial staff of Le Monde also specifies several examples of projects currently implemented using artificial intelligence tools: its Le Monde In English project, which aims to translate articles produced by the editorial staff into English using automatic translation, or even the provision of an audio version of the articles.
With this partnership agreement, the management of the daily hopes to be able to “explore the advances in this technology by best anticipating its consequences, negative or favorable” but also believes that this is a beneficial agreement for the the entire profession, which should pave the way for other similar agreements with other players. In France, the Ouest France group is also one of the press groups that have started working with OpenAI, as Mind revealed in February. But the communication from the regional press group confirms that for the moment, this partnership remains an experiment allowing it to test the American company’s tools, without offering access to the content produced by its editorial staff and without financial compensation.
At the European level, OpenAI also announced yesterday a similar agreement with the Spanish group Prisa Media, which publishes several national daily newspapers including El País and the Spanish edition of HuffingtonPost. In December 2023, the German press group Axel Springer was one of the first European players to announce a similar agreement with OpenAI.
Across the Atlantic, certain media such as the New York Times have adopted a very different strategy by suing OpenAI. The American daily accuses OpenAI of having used its articles to train its language model without having respected copyright, and of reusing without its authorization extracts from articles produced by the New York Times without authorization. This does not prevent the use of artificial intelligence tools from becoming popular among journalists; certain articles nominated for the Pulitzer Prize have thus used automatic text generation tools for their writing, as some have recognized. authors.