News Corp’s landmark partnership with OpenAI ensures The Post’s parent company will be at the “cutting edge of the digital age” during a time of major upheaval across the news industry, CEO Robert Thomson said in a memo to staffers. The publishing giant’s deal with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, announced in May, allows the ChatGPT creator to use current and archived content produced by News Corp-owned outlets — which also include The Wall Street Journal, The Sun and The Times of London — to answer user questions and train its AI models. The deal marks an “important moment to recalibrate the world of search” long dominated by Google — and puts News Corp in position to benefit from the rise of AI rather than “dancing with digital demise,” according to Thomson.
“Provenance deserves prominence. Having a role in fashioning the future is definitely preferable to being a prisoner of the past,” Thomson said. “[Generative] AI is a threat, a real threat to journalism.
Its ability to mimic and manipulate is endless. We are at a particularly early stage of its evolution, and it is an exponentially expedited evolution.” Plunging traffic and ad revenue has led to mass layoffs and newsroom closures, with outlets like The Messenger, Vice and Buzzfeed among those affected.
While Big Tech’s increased influence is partly to blame, Thomson noted that the media industry has been slow to recognize the impact of AI and the “irrepressible ascendancy of the mobile.
