5 ms·

Condé Nast Signs Deal with OpenAI

81 points by spenvo 2y ago

throwaway082024 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
perks_12 2y ago
This is nothing but appeasement. Publishers at large won't know what hit them once searchgpt drops. The written internet is doomed.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Publishers at large won't know what hit them once searchgpt drops A multi-billion dollar cheque? Voluntarily relinquished or via a settlement?
- freediver 2y ago
  > The written internet is doomed. As someone who used searchgpt and is also building a competing product, I can say this is simply not going to be the case. LLM assisted search leaves just too much to be desired and there is no future in which this is the primary way for humans to consume information. It needs to be augmented with credible sources of information or rather using LLMs only makes sense once you have access to credible source information in the first place, and want to have an augmented version of the information you consume (and are happy with non discrete outcomes).
  - gregw134 2y ago
    Are you allowed to tell us about SearchGPT, and what you like/dislike about it?
    - freediver 2y ago
      Its use case is limited and even in those cases where is it well suited, you have to be ready that its purpose is to at best inform, not educate.
- labster 2y ago
  It’s true. Why turn to the mainstream media when GPT can just hallucinate the news that I want to hear?
  - time-less-ness 2y ago
    The best fabricated and entirely hallucinated news comes from the mainstream. AI-generated content is too logical and internally-consistent to be real.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      AI-generated content is both trained on and “guardrailed” against said hallucinated news. There is no escape.
- leereeves 2y ago
  If the written internet is doomed, what will searchgpt train on in the future? In that scenario, in a few years it will be out of date and doomed too.
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    > If the written internet is doomed, what will searchgpt train on in the future? It will train on what people say in their cellphones or in front of their Smart TVs or in their deeply connected cars. If data is being transmitted after encryption (within a closed and undocumented chip) to a server in a country that doesn't cooperate with authorities, then the same data is pseudo-anonymized and bought back on a different channel, that will make very hard to stop it.
    - smegger001 2y ago
      social media, press releases, and what ever is left surviving of traditional journalism after the internet then social media and now ai kill anything local or niche, so the big news papers of note (new york time/wa post/wall st journal or the local equivalent) and transcripts of network news, and the international wire service news feeds (ap news, Reuters) and any popular blog of verified real people still are out there always checking them to make sure their content isn't itself ai generated.
- Vayu 2y ago
  I'd argue that dead internet theory actually provides more merit to places like news where they go through rounds of editorial processes. That being said, there're a lot of generated news platforms so it'll be up to the user to decide on who they trust.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > The written internet is doomed. And the video internet is under ever-increasing enshittification.-
- liveoneggs 2y ago
  they can sign this deal with the devil and survive to fight another day or get eaten by him anyway
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Maybe, for some of their magazines (Vogue, say). For CN Traveler, I'm pretty sure that readers want an actual picture of the interior of the new hotel, not an AI rendering of something that as yet has few actual pictures to train the model on. (For that matter, Vogue might have that same thing going on with fashion.)
BadHumans 2y ago
I feel that all of these deals are an implicit acknowledgement that what OpenAI and all of these companies did training on everyone's' content and data was illegal. If you're so certain that what you did was fine and fair use then why go through the trouble of spending all this money on licensing deals? Unless they just think that dealing with all of the lawsuits would cost more than just paying people to go away.
- drooby 2y ago
  Perhaps because that is still being disputed in court? The outcome is unknown and they are making a defensive play? If it turns out they shouldn't have done that, then when the dust settles they will be ahead of the competitors that didn't sign deals.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  No it's a simple net present cost calculation. Its cheaper than continued litigation and ensures they maintain access in future (rather than the publisher in question starts blocking their web crawlers). Once they've got deals with the few really big players, the rest of the industry falls into line (the smaller guys don't have the financial means to out-litigate or block OpenAI).
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  The difference between "ack it was illegal" and "certain it was fine" and how easily you skip over it. Trying to make things better is good and requires no admittance of guilt.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I've thought of it as more of a they didn't have money to license at first, then the models got decent enough for them to charge for use, now they are trying to avoid getting the models shut down for violations by making deals. Too bad only the large players that got scraped will have these deals made while the smaller players are left without
- HeavenFox 2y ago
pelagicAustral 2y ago
I don't understand the underlying mechanisms that will allow for these new partnerships to work, but reading bits like "ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property,", do make wonder how said "compensation" is going to be calculated, and distributed. Assets like New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit (all mentioned in the article), do come with editorial lines, perhaps editorial lines I do not agree with, so how is their content going to be injected in my search results/gpt answers? Is it going to be an organic affair such as: - (Me) "How many times a year shall I renew my socks?" - "That's and amazing question! According to journal X ... (blah blah blah, probably a good answer)" (maybe add some notes for a copyrighted article with a link) Or it going to turn into: - (Same question) - "The far-right movement seems to be skipping sock renewal policies, but contrary to this, brown socks are trending in Europe this coming summer, don't miss this chance to buy yours at: website.com"
- Temporary_31337 2y ago
  Worth pointing out that brown shirts (and matching socks hopefully) were a very far right symbol probably pink or rainbow if you’re going for anti Nazi look
  - decremental 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Spivak 2y ago
    And for anyone who's wondering why https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
  - _lvbh 2y ago
    Oh shit I did not know that. Is there any law against it or would I get fined in the UK? I’m Malaysian and all this has nothing to do with me so I wasn’t aware. I get my shirts and socks essentially randomly & sometimes the colors may unintentionally represent something wrong.
- awkward 2y ago
goles 2y ago
https://archive.is/kNdE0 https://archive.is/kNdE0 OpenAI announcement - https://openai.com/index/conde-nast/ https://openai.com/index/conde-nast/
pmdr 2y ago
I can't put my finger on it just yet, but I have a feeling the average content creator isn't going to benefit from all this deal-making.
- omega3 2y ago
  Hard to see what the benefit to the customers is.
  - micromacrofoot 2y ago
    shareholder value
    - omega3 2y ago
      This isn’t a benefit to a customer, only to shareholders.
      - micromacrofoot 2y ago
        without the shareholders there's no company
- redbell 2y ago
  > The average content creator isn't going to benefit.. A couple of months ago, when the news about "Reddit to sell its user-generated content to Google," a redditor asks the community to start generating false comments so the data would be of bad quality to train the models on. They start brainstorming some very funny comments that go something like: "Blue Whale is the largest fish", "WW II started in 1943", You name it..
  - pmdr 2y ago
    It might not prove to be that effective. I think common knowledge has been reinforced by hundreds of other sources that it's hard to pollute it. Specific, expert-level knowledge deriving from one's experience is more scarce and thus more valuable. If redditors run around faking that, then it could feed the models bad data. But might also reflect poorly on the author should reputation be at stake.
johnhenry 2y ago
> Condé Nast and OpenAI have struck a multi-year deal that will allow the AI giant to use content from the media giant’s roster of properties—which includes the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, and, yes, WIRED. I'm disappointed by the fact that this disclaimer isn't more explicit.
anotherhue 2y ago
Smells like a pre-emptive settlement to me.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
Someone unleashed some sort of AI on UberEats the other day apparently, because I was looking for Chinese food and found entire menus filled with nonsensical descriptions. Did you know that Dan Dan noodles, Orange Chicken, and Mei Fun noodles are all made with wonton wrappers and cream cheese? Me neither!
mensetmanusman 2y ago
This is the robot.txt-ification of entrenching OpenAI.
bionhoward 2y ago
Bad call. OpenAI are absolutely the bad guys because they learn from others while claiming it illegal harmful or abusive to learn from them. Just block em

81 points by spenvo 2y ago

throwaway082024 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

perks_12 2y ago

This is nothing but appeasement. Publishers at large won't know what hit them once searchgpt drops. The written internet is doomed.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Publishers at large won't know what hit them once searchgpt drops A multi-billion dollar cheque? Voluntarily relinquished or via a settlement?
freediver 2y ago
> The written internet is doomed. As someone who used searchgpt and is also building a competing product, I can say this is simply not going to be the case. LLM assisted search leaves just too much to be desired and there is no future in which this is the primary way for humans to consume information. It needs to be augmented with credible sources of information or rather using LLMs only makes sense once you have access to credible source information in the first place, and want to have an augmented version of the information you consume (and are happy with non discrete outcomes).
- gregw134 2y ago
  Are you allowed to tell us about SearchGPT, and what you like/dislike about it?
  - freediver 2y ago
    Its use case is limited and even in those cases where is it well suited, you have to be ready that its purpose is to at best inform, not educate.
labster 2y ago
It’s true. Why turn to the mainstream media when GPT can just hallucinate the news that I want to hear?
- time-less-ness 2y ago
  The best fabricated and entirely hallucinated news comes from the mainstream. AI-generated content is too logical and internally-consistent to be real.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    AI-generated content is both trained on and “guardrailed” against said hallucinated news. There is no escape.
leereeves 2y ago
If the written internet is doomed, what will searchgpt train on in the future? In that scenario, in a few years it will be out of date and doomed too.
- squarefoot 2y ago
  > If the written internet is doomed, what will searchgpt train on in the future? It will train on what people say in their cellphones or in front of their Smart TVs or in their deeply connected cars. If data is being transmitted after encryption (within a closed and undocumented chip) to a server in a country that doesn't cooperate with authorities, then the same data is pseudo-anonymized and bought back on a different channel, that will make very hard to stop it.
  - smegger001 2y ago
    social media, press releases, and what ever is left surviving of traditional journalism after the internet then social media and now ai kill anything local or niche, so the big news papers of note (new york time/wa post/wall st journal or the local equivalent) and transcripts of network news, and the international wire service news feeds (ap news, Reuters) and any popular blog of verified real people still are out there always checking them to make sure their content isn't itself ai generated.
Vayu 2y ago
I'd argue that dead internet theory actually provides more merit to places like news where they go through rounds of editorial processes. That being said, there're a lot of generated news platforms so it'll be up to the user to decide on who they trust.
Bluestein 2y ago
> The written internet is doomed. And the video internet is under ever-increasing enshittification.-
liveoneggs 2y ago
they can sign this deal with the devil and survive to fight another day or get eaten by him anyway
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Maybe, for some of their magazines (Vogue, say). For CN Traveler, I'm pretty sure that readers want an actual picture of the interior of the new hotel, not an AI rendering of something that as yet has few actual pictures to train the model on. (For that matter, Vogue might have that same thing going on with fashion.)

BadHumans 2y ago

I feel that all of these deals are an implicit acknowledgement that what OpenAI and all of these companies did training on everyone's' content and data was illegal. If you're so certain that what you did was fine and fair use then why go through the trouble of spending all this money on licensing deals? Unless they just think that dealing with all of the lawsuits would cost more than just paying people to go away.

drooby 2y ago
Perhaps because that is still being disputed in court? The outcome is unknown and they are making a defensive play? If it turns out they shouldn't have done that, then when the dust settles they will be ahead of the competitors that didn't sign deals.
KoolKat23 2y ago
No it's a simple net present cost calculation. Its cheaper than continued litigation and ensures they maintain access in future (rather than the publisher in question starts blocking their web crawlers). Once they've got deals with the few really big players, the rest of the industry falls into line (the smaller guys don't have the financial means to out-litigate or block OpenAI).
jstummbillig 2y ago
The difference between "ack it was illegal" and "certain it was fine" and how easily you skip over it. Trying to make things better is good and requires no admittance of guilt.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I've thought of it as more of a they didn't have money to license at first, then the models got decent enough for them to charge for use, now they are trying to avoid getting the models shut down for violations by making deals. Too bad only the large players that got scraped will have these deals made while the smaller players are left without
HeavenFox 2y ago

pelagicAustral 2y ago

I don't understand the underlying mechanisms that will allow for these new partnerships to work, but reading bits like "ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property,", do make wonder how said "compensation" is going to be calculated, and distributed. Assets like New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit (all mentioned in the article), do come with editorial lines, perhaps editorial lines I do not agree with, so how is their content going to be injected in my search results/gpt answers? Is it going to be an organic affair such as: - (Me) "How many times a year shall I renew my socks?" - "That's and amazing question! According to journal X ... (blah blah blah, probably a good answer)" (maybe add some notes for a copyrighted article with a link) Or it going to turn into: - (Same question) - "The far-right movement seems to be skipping sock renewal policies, but contrary to this, brown socks are trending in Europe this coming summer, don't miss this chance to buy yours at: website.com"

Temporary_31337 2y ago
Worth pointing out that brown shirts (and matching socks hopefully) were a very far right symbol probably pink or rainbow if you’re going for anti Nazi look
- decremental 2y ago
  [dead]
- Spivak 2y ago
  And for anyone who's wondering why https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
- _lvbh 2y ago
  Oh shit I did not know that. Is there any law against it or would I get fined in the UK? I’m Malaysian and all this has nothing to do with me so I wasn’t aware. I get my shirts and socks essentially randomly & sometimes the colors may unintentionally represent something wrong.
awkward 2y ago

goles 2y ago

https://archive.is/kNdE0 https://archive.is/kNdE0 OpenAI announcement - https://openai.com/index/conde-nast/ https://openai.com/index/conde-nast/

pmdr 2y ago

I can't put my finger on it just yet, but I have a feeling the average content creator isn't going to benefit from all this deal-making.

omega3 2y ago
Hard to see what the benefit to the customers is.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  shareholder value
  - omega3 2y ago
    This isn’t a benefit to a customer, only to shareholders.
    - micromacrofoot 2y ago
      without the shareholders there's no company
redbell 2y ago
> The average content creator isn't going to benefit.. A couple of months ago, when the news about "Reddit to sell its user-generated content to Google," a redditor asks the community to start generating false comments so the data would be of bad quality to train the models on. They start brainstorming some very funny comments that go something like: "Blue Whale is the largest fish", "WW II started in 1943", You name it..
- pmdr 2y ago
  It might not prove to be that effective. I think common knowledge has been reinforced by hundreds of other sources that it's hard to pollute it. Specific, expert-level knowledge deriving from one's experience is more scarce and thus more valuable. If redditors run around faking that, then it could feed the models bad data. But might also reflect poorly on the author should reputation be at stake.

johnhenry 2y ago

> Condé Nast and OpenAI have struck a multi-year deal that will allow the AI giant to use content from the media giant’s roster of properties—which includes the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, and, yes, WIRED. I'm disappointed by the fact that this disclaimer isn't more explicit.

anotherhue 2y ago

Smells like a pre-emptive settlement to me.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

Someone unleashed some sort of AI on UberEats the other day apparently, because I was looking for Chinese food and found entire menus filled with nonsensical descriptions. Did you know that Dan Dan noodles, Orange Chicken, and Mei Fun noodles are all made with wonton wrappers and cream cheese? Me neither!

mensetmanusman 2y ago

This is the robot.txt-ification of entrenching OpenAI.

bionhoward 2y ago

Bad call. OpenAI are absolutely the bad guys because they learn from others while claiming it illegal harmful or abusive to learn from them. Just block em