OpenAI's Collaboration with Associated Press: A New Era for Journalism or the End of Traditional Reporting?

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Since the beginning of the AI revolution, a very big area that has been in the crosshairs of AI is journalists, journalism, and publishers.

0:38Of course, we know that AI is incredibly powerful when it comes to writing articles. So today on the podcast, I want to talk about one of the biggest journalistic sources, one of the biggest publishers that is partnering with OpenAI. and I'm going to talk about how I believe that is going to impact the overall segment of news, that overall market segment. And the first thing I want to bring up is the fact that just not too long ago, there's a big controversy with CNET because CNET, it was discovered that they were using AI, probably ChatGPT or, you know, DaVinci or whatever, to help them write articles.

1:14And they actually had an entire section on CNET where they, you know, eventually it was found out that there was like a specific journalist name and I can't remember what it was. It was something like CNET staff or something. So if it didn't have a specific person's name, then that meant that it was written by AI. And they were using this to actually write a whole bunch of articles to essentially beef up their website to write a bunch of extra articles extra fast. They had this CNET staff, aka ChatGPT, that was just spinning out a ton of articles. It probably had someone going and deciding what the headlines were or maybe what the most popular searches they were trying to capture.

1:46But in any case CNET did this it was a big huge controversy when people found out because there was an article that was talking about compound interest and the way that chat GPT had calculated the compound interest in the article wasn't correct now most of the information it was sharing about compound interest was correct you know the rest of the articles that were published were like fairly solid but you know there had been some calculations that were missed and of course we know that this is one of the earliest weaknesses of chat GPT and open AI was in you know calculations and all that kind of that aspect of things and so this is no surprise but this kind of kicked off this whole fear of journalists once they realized that you know cnet was starting to replace people there was a bunch of different news companies that were firing people we know that vice i think recently declared bankruptcy um buzzfeed i i'm not sure if buzzfeed declared bankruptcy or they're having some severe um money problems and buzzfeed also has announced recently that they are going to be um oh yeah it's buzzfeed news buzzfeed news declared bankruptcy as well but i don't know if the whole parent company did.

2:44In any case, they said something about restructuring. In any case, BuzzFeed is also using AI to help them, right? So there was this whole controversy. Journalists were saying, you know, AI needs to be banned from the newsroom. Some people are saying AI is going to replace the newsroom. There's this whole thing. And I think this is really important because just recently, yesterday, OpenAI announced that they are going to be partnering with the Associated Press, which is kind of, you know, the OG. It's one of the most reputable press companies, everyone, essentially when the Associated Press publishes something, everyone usually covers it.

3:17But the Associated Press is going to be partnering with OpenAI and allowing OpenAI to train its future and current AI models off of all of the articles on the Associated Press. This is really interesting. I think we're seeing a lot more of these kind of OpenAI partnering with a specific company to grab their data. And this is cool because I think, I mean, cool. I think this is a smart move by OpenAI because essentially they're saying, hey, we'll let you see the inside scoop. We're gonna give you some tips on technology and whatnot. And in exchange, you are going to be allowing us to scrape and train off of all of your articles and all of your, in AP's archive as far back as 1985.

3:55So as part of the agreement, AP is going to gain access to OpenAI's quote unquote technology and product expertise. So we're not exactly sure what that means per se, although I'm sure they have some sort of partnership that they're working on. But I think that AP has been exploring the use of AI features for quite a long time, according to them. I think that, you know, AI features and this whole thing kind of began generating reports about company earnings back in 2014. So, you know, obviously they've been using AI to do a lot of different things even since back then. And I think it later leveraged AI to kind of automate stories about minor league baseball and college sports, right?

4:36Perhaps something they didn't have the manpower to have a journalist writing every single story about college sports or minor league baseball. So they actually had AI helping them on that. I think AP is joining AI's really fast growing list of partners. They have a lot of people that are working with them right now. On Tuesday, OpenAI actually announced a six year deal with Shutterstock that's going to allow OpenAI to license images. I think this is on the back of a lot of AI models getting sued by Getty Images and others because they trained them on images they didn't have rights to. So I think now they're, you know, going and OpenAI is getting, building deals with Shutterstock and others to essentially allow them to license images, videos, music, and metadata, which I think is something a lot of people aren't thinking about.

5:18But metadata gives you a lot of extra information about different pieces of content, and they're using that to train their text image model and Dolly. So BuzzFeed said that it's going to be using these AI tools as well, provided by OpenAI to quote-unquote enhance and personalize its content. And OpenAI is also working with Microsoft on a number of different things in this space. But Greg Brockman recently tweeted, he said, Announcing partnership with AP will help them thoughtfully explore use cases for our technology. We'll work with their content in our systems. And Associated Press tweeted, AP OpenAI agree to share select news content and technology in new collaboration.

5:57Now, the thing is, Associated Press isn't really saying what exactly they're doing with all of this, with their partnership with OpenAI. But inevitably, like, we know where this is going. OpenAI is helping them to, like, replace journalists, you could say, but essentially automate news publishing. Right, like, as we've seen, there's a lot of different aspects of the news. minor league baseball and other things college you know sports that uh we might not have the manpower they might not have the manpower to cover everything and so they're going to use ai to do it i think that ai is going to start bleeding in similar to cena into actually more mainstream articles if something drops um would they rather like here's the thing if a news story drops and they can have a chat gpt push a button and instantly publish it the second after some breaking news happens i think that's going to be very appealing in the news industry speed is going to be of the essence and these AIs, in my opinion, are going to churn out stuff really crazy.

6:52And now imagine a future where perhaps every journalist at the Associated Press has an AI trained off of them and their style. All they have to do is say, write a news story about X, Y, and Z facts and the implications about X, Y, and Z. You can feed the information and bullet points in in about 10 seconds. And then this thing will generate the whole article. You proofread it, say, yep, that sounds like me. You go and like hit up a few people request for comment. You can publish the story immediately after the event happens. And then as the requests for comment roll in and people are commenting on it, you can start feeding them in and bulk up the story a little bit, you know, post launch.

7:23There's a lot of things you could do leveraging AI and news to really work on being the fastest with a story. And oftentimes the first person to break the story is the winner. So I think that's really, really, really, really critical. Here's a quote from Brad Lightcap, which is OpenAI's chief operating officer. He said this recently in a statement, he said, The AP continues to be an industry leader in the use of AI. Their feedback, along with the access to their high-quality factual text archive, will help to improve the capabilities and usefulness of OpenAI's systems. So I think earlier this year, AP announced a bunch of AI-powered projects that will essentially publish Spanish-language news alerts and document public safety incidents in a Minnesota newspaper, right?

8:04So they have these kind of two random use cases, Minnesota newspaper, and then also Spanish-language news alerts. And then the outlet also launched an AI search tool that's supposed to make it easier for news partners to find photos and videos in its libraries based on descriptive language. So they have this massive library of data and content. A lot of times if you look at news articles and they have like an image embedded in them, oftentimes the source will be Associated Press because the Associated Press will have gotten a picture that's relevant for them. And so that AI tool is going to help different news companies use that.

8:38I'm assuming they pay a licensing fee for that. what's interesting is the fact that it's like they're they're documenting public safety incidents in a minnesota newspaper it sounds so obscure and small but inevitably you know this is going to be public safety incidences in all newspapers like those kind of things that are really standard cut and dry they'll be able to do as well as spanish language news alerts um it sounds like they're testing this the whole system in a whole country or a whole region or area a whole language so that is potential that you know if it works great in spain and mexico and spanish-speaking places they can roll that out to english-speaking places as well um i think that the ap's partnership with open ai seems like a really natural next step in a lot of these ai moves they've been making but i think there's still a lot of really important details that are missing about how they're going to use it so i think that the ap says um it does quote unquote does not use it in its news stories which maybe they don't now maybe they will in the future here's the thing like if you had a an AI trained off of you specifically and you put in the news stories and it published and it just like wrote the thing and then you go and like proofread it make sure it sounds good and you're doing that to be the fastest person in my opinion that sounds like a perfect use case I think they pride themselves on being like no but like no way I could ever write but like I mean like realistically yes the AI could be trained off of any of your journalists and could write just like them and it could do a great job the journalist could then review it and take a tenth of the time I think journalists intrinsically feel gross about that like concept but I think that's where it's going to get and if the Associated Press doesn't do it other journals will so it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the future obviously people don't like the feeling of oh man this was written by AI or AI wrote this whatever but I think people are going to have to get over that bias eventually because if it's the cheapest thing and the fastest thing inevitably when the quality gets up to the same or better than a human it's just going to win in the end so it'll be interesting to follow this and see where this goes at the end of the day.