News Corp grants ChatGPT access to major publications for training

The ChatGPT logo can be seen on a cell phone screen. News Corp grants ChatGPT access to major publications for training. Hannes P Albert/dpa

The popular chatbot ChatGPT will be able to access articles from the Wall Street Journal and the London Times in future, ChatGPT developer OpenAI announced on Wednesday.

OpenAI has concluded a multi-year agreement with media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp group, allowing ChatGPT to display information to users and use the content to train the software.

The deal will also grant ChatGPT access to current and archive material from other News Corp titles, including the New York Post and The Sun.

In recent months, OpenAI has struck deals with various media organizations, including the German Axel Springer Group, the French newspaper Le Monde, and the Financial Times.

The New York Times, on the other hand, took the company to court in December, alleging that ChatGPT had been trained with the newspaper's articles without permission.

Recently, several American regional newspapers owned by the investor Alden Global Capital - including the "Chicago Tribune" and the "New York Daily News" - also sued OpenAI.

ChatGPT fuelled the hype surrounding artificial intelligence over a year ago.

Such generative AI chatbots are trained with huge amounts of information and can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human, write software code and summarize information.

The principle behind this is that the chatbots estimate word for word how a sentence should continue, on the basis of probability.