Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson has said the publisher “would do a deal” with an AI company “but only on the right terms”. Bateson made the comments on Tuesday while appearing alongside four other news executives at the Deloitte and Enders Media and Telecoms conference in London. At the same conference last year Bateson joined colleagues from Le Monde, The Telegraph and the Financial Times in calling for publishers to “get control” of their intellectual property from generative AI companies .
One year on, two of those other news businesses — Le Monde and the FT — have each made deals with ChatGPT creator OpenAI . Asked whether The Guardian would do the same, Bateson said: “Would we do a deal? Yes — but only on the right terms and for the right value. And I think that’s easy to say and it’s very hard to actually deliver.
“Without in any way wanting to diminish or underestimate the potential opportunity and power of the technology [AI] — the technology businesses do seem to sort of believe that they’re exceptional, in a way, and that they don’t necessarily have to pay for the things that everyone else respects...
“They’re happy to pay for talent and they’re happy to pay for computing power, but then they don’t want to pay for data. “I’m sure we’d all love to say: ‘We’re going to reduce our cost to our businesses by not paying for the things that are fundamental to the way that we run our businesses.’ We’d l.
