It isn’t. All Murdoch has done is claw back a fraction of the revenue that massive platform businesses have taken from the publishing business.
In signing a deal with the AI devil,Murdoch and the Microsoft-controlled OpenAI (the owner of ChatGPT) have joined the club of frenemies or (commercially speaking) enemies with benefits.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has signed a deal with OpenAI.AP
The question that should be asked is why News Corp would have given this language AI giant access to all its major news publications for a reported US$50 million ($76 million) a year over five years.
Sadly,this isn’t a deal that deserves criticism. AI has been pirating the content of News Corp (and every other media company) for years. It has used published content to feed its large learning sausage factories and paying publishers including News Corp nothing for it.
Now that the deal is done – and sure,it’s better than getting nothing – News Corp needs to sing its financial praises.
Indeed,News Corp’s chief executive to second-guess any critics of this lopsided deal. “(What) we’re not doing is channelling my erudite,eloquent fellow Australians AC/DC:it wasn’t Dirty Deals Done Dirt Cheap,” Thomson assured everyone in a free interpretation of.
Remember the mega AI platforms are the same ones that Thomson referred to only a few months ago – a comment he made while he was actually in the throes of doing this deal with Altman.
Needless to say,those platforms have been undermining the revenue streams of publishers including Nine,which owns this publication.
Eighteen months ago,publishers – thanks to the Australian government,which has been remarkable in its proactive response to the platform giants – made a deal that provided them with some compensation from Google and Meta,Facebook’s parent company. While Google is happy for this compensation deal to continue,Meta has become recalcitrant.
‘[What] we’re not doing is channelling my erudite,eloquent fellow Australians AC/DC:it wasn’t Dirty Deals Done Dirt Cheap.’
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson
And News Corp isn’t the first of the worldwide publishers to do a deal with the AI enemy – it’s just the largest.
Indeed,publishers seem to be lining up to speak with OpenAI,which is clearly on a mission to sign up as many of them as possible.
So here is what we know about the deal.
News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson gave lots of flourishes,but little facts on the deal.Getty
In the words of News Corp’s press release,“OpenAI will receive access to current and archived content from News Corp’s major news and information publications,includingThe Wall Street Journal,Barron’s,MarketWatch,Investor’s Business Daily,FN,and New York Post;The Times,The Sunday TimesandThe Sun;The Australian,news.com.au,The Daily Telegraph,The Courier Mail,The Advertiser,and Herald Sun;and others.”
That is about where the information train stops on this deal.
Thomson provided the Fox News audience with lots of flourishes,but little facts.
“We can’t go into specific details about the agreement,other than to say it’s quite profound in its consequences for journalism,and not only journalism now,but journalism in the future. And so we’re very proud to partner with Sam[Altman] and his team,and it’s just clear that they appreciate the preciousness of provenance,” Thomson said in the live interview.
Piecing together the bits of information that have been released officially (and those unofficially garnered from the story posted by the News Corp-ownedWall Street Journal),OpenAI has permission to display content from News Corp mastheads in response to user questions,and to enhance its products and search answers with display links to articles in News Corp publications.
(One can only assume that those using OpenAI will not have access to News Corp’s articles that sit behind a paywall. To do so would seriously undermine the publisher’s business model.)
From News Corp’s perspective,it can boast that the tie-up with OpenAI provides it with another distribution channel.
“There’s been this huge shift of value and power and leverage from creators to distributors,and clearly the AI age is another iteration of distribution,” Thomson said. “That’s why being a partner with Sam and his team is so important,that we get the balance right between creation and distribution,and what we’re distributing has the essence of provenance in it.”
It is exactly that shift in leverage that makes any deal done between even the largest of publishers and AI dangerously one-sided.
Despite this poor negotiating position,many publishers have lined up to take a bit of cash from OpenAI or its equivalents. To them,it’s better doing a deal with the devil than doing no deal.
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