OpenAI and Time Announce Multi-Year Content Partnership

Time is the latest media enterprise to ink a strategic content partnership with OpenAI. The new multi-year agreement, announced on Saturday, will grant OpenAI access to Time’s current and historical content, while Time will leverage OpenAI’s technology to develop new products.

Through this partnership, Sam Altman’s AI enterprise will gain access to 101 years of Time’s archives to enhance and train its products, including ChatGPT. The agreement also stipulates that when ChatGPT provides answers derived from Time’s articles, it will include citations and links back to the original source on Time.com.

As part of the agreement, Time magazine will also offer feedback to OpenAI and share practical applications to improve the delivery of journalistic content on OpenAI products.

“Throughout our 101-year history, Time has embraced innovation to ensure that the delivery of our trusted journalism evolves alongside technology,” said Time Chief Operating Officer Mark Howard in a statement. “This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally…,” he said.

“We’re partnering with TIME to make it easier for people to access news content through our AI tools, and to support reputable journalism by providing proper attribution to original sources,” said Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer of OpenAI.

OpenAI has signed similar agreements in the past few months with various media outlets, including News Corp, The AP, Dotdash Meredith, Vox Media, Business Insider-owner Axel Springer, and France’s Le Monde.

However, not all media publishers are embracing such content alliances. Companies like the New York Times, Raw Story, AlterNet, and The Intercept have raised objections to Microsoft and OpenAI’s use of copyrighted journalistic content for training AI models. The New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in December 2023, followed by similar lawsuits from The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet in February of this year.

The Time-OpenAI partnership arrives at a critical period when media companies are facing a pivotal choice – whether to challenge the unregulated utilization of their content by AI firms for chatbot training or to embrace strategic content partnerships that offer a fresh revenue stream for their intellectual property.