AI licensing deals could become the new norm as copyright suits pile up

May AI approach the bench?.… AI models are trained on massive amounts of data, from billions of web articles to books and images. That’s led to quite a few copyright infringement lawsuits, with high-profile names launching legal battles that could set a precedent. Last year, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they trained their bots on millions of Times articles. There are also several suits from authors including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult. In August, artists cleared a big hurdle in their case against AI art generator Stable Diffusion. Even open-source coders are going to court against AI companies. 

Got my AI license last week… About 90% of top news outlets block AI crawlers from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia to prevent their content from getting scraped (it’s not always effective). But as copyright-infringement claims intensify, AI companies are starting to strike major content licensing deals. This year OpenAI announced a partnership with Wall Street Journal owner News Corp that would let it use the publisher’s articles to answer queries and in training (it’s said to be a $250M deal). OpenAI made a similar deal last year with Axel Springer (Business Insider, Politico) to use its content in ChatGPT. In May, OpenAI announced that it’ll license data from Reddit. And last month “John Wick” studio Lionsgate gave AI-video startup Runway access to its movie library.

The next chapter… Licensing deals may become common as AI companies try to avoid legal fallout before lawsuits set a precedent. And while the cases are moving through court, media companies may be trying to get ahead of the AI shift before it gets ahead of them.